


sweetest talk

by subversiveabsurdity



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: Eventual Smut, F/F, Gender or Sex Swap, I think this counts, If you want - Freeform, Maylor - Freeform, Regina Taylor - Freeform, Slow Burn, Useless Lesbians, brianna may - Freeform, fem!deacury too if you squint, fem!maylor, i think, king AU, we'll see, what constitutes slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2019-11-03 23:06:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17886827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subversiveabsurdity/pseuds/subversiveabsurdity
Summary: brianna may, a barista at a 24-hour coffee shop, is charmed by regina taylor, an alluring traveller. useless lesbians.





	1. sweetest talk

**Author's Note:**

> // i am not affiliated with the band queen, please don't send any of these to queen or their families, this is all in good gay fun //
> 
> hi!  
> i am a slut for maylor and i'm also a lesbian so i thought i'd just go ahead and do this   
> i listen to music when i write and often draw inspiration from songs, so each chapter has an associated song if you care to listen.  
> (ALSO: it's worth nothing: this fic is a gender- and sex-swap, meaning the main characters are cisgender women. i think every fandom could use more fics with trans characters, but i'm cis and i don't feel it's my place to write one or tell trans people's stories. just wanted to clarify.)  
> let's get into it!  
> \- soph

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a 24-hour coffee shop, stolen jewelry, and a long night
> 
> (sweetest talk - habibi)

_one - sweetest talk_

_and when she walks, she's got the sweetest walk_  
_and when she talks, she's got the sweetest talk_

Brianna has been wary of taking evening shifts at the 24-hour coffee shop. Firstly, because it would mean walking home through the city alone at night, which scares her even if it’s only a 15-minute affair. Second, because the Northwest Moon fills up with all sorts of strange types when the sun goes down.

“This bloke, he comes in nearly every evening,” Johanna, her coworker, had told her once. “He sits right over there in that corner, reads the same book. I can’t ever make out what it is but he goes all wonky and yells at nobody.”

Melina, another coworker, is the reason Brianna has finally taken a nighttime shift at the shop. She’d rung Brianna that morning, hacking up a lung, but profusely apologetic -- " _I’m so, so sorry Bri, darling, can you take my shift tonight? I’m horribly off-colour ever since last week…"_

 _I’m a good friend_ , Brianna thinks to herself as she begins her walk to the shop that night. The twilight sky is a mottled pinkish-grey, fresh and bright after a day of rain. It’s a bit nippy, being September, but she’s been stuck up in her matchbox-sized bedsit the whole day and the bite to the air refreshes her.

Brianna lives just across the river from the Northwest Moon. Upon her arrival, the sky has turned mostly wisteria-coloured, tinging ever darker, with the stormy leftovers of that day’s rainstorm rolling back inland. A chilled mist starts drizzling down just as the shop’s dirty light box sign comes into view down the street.

  
Her limbs relax when she sees the shop is empty but for Johanna. She’s sat behind the counter, busying herself with something Brianna can’t quite make out yet as she opens the shop door. Johanna looks up.

“Oh, thank Christ, you’re here. As you can see, we’re absolutely flooded at the moment,” she waves a hand at the quiet shop. She’s got a ball of yellow yarn in her lap, and a crochet needle in one hand.

“Has it been this empty all day?” Brianna takes off her jacket and walks behind the counter.

“I’ve been in an hour or so and I’ve had two or three customers, all to-go’s. Liam took off a while ago and he said it’s been a slow day.”

Brianna starts pulling her hair into a ponytail. “Judging by the impressive chain you’ve got going there…I’ll assume you’ve done the rounds?”

Johanna doesn’t look up but huffs. “I’ve scrubbed down all the tables twice, Bri.” She readjusts the growing crochet chain in her lap so it trails down to the ground. “What am I going to do, walk around and look for things to do when I could be working on this lovely scarf for Melina?”

Brianna kicks at the ground with the heel of her trainer, looking back out at the now-downpour outside. Against the watery blue evening, the shop seems much brighter and friendly, despite its emptiness. Its front is lined with windows crammed with local advertisements and posters, and some flickery coloured fairy lights are pinned along the frames. The shop’s interior is probably too cosy and tight-knit for some people’s comfort. It’s crammed with stuffy mismatched chairs that sink nearly straight to the floor when you sit in them, and there’s a sofa that Brianna avoids because it smells like someone spilled a spoiled coffee spiked with rum onto its cushions. The floor is wood panels, but is covered almost entirely by Turkish rugs and carpets (The biggest one belongs to Melina and she takes it home weekly to clean and dry it the way she likes). One thing Brianna and Johanna both hate about the shop is the garish green colour of the walls -- but it isn’t so noticeable to the customers since Johanna’s made an effort to cover the space in bookshelves, tapestries, and whatever else. The place looks a bit like someone rearranged a second-hand store into a cafe. The front door is nestled in the far right corner of the shop, and it’s a straight-shot from there to the cash register.  
Just as Brianna’s wrinkling her nose, staring at the coffee-rum sofa, the front door tinkles.

Johanna stuffs her crocheting under the counter and stands up. Brianna straightens up too, readying herself behind the espresso machine.

The girl’s wearing an expression like she’s walked into the wrong place, but she seems mildly interested nonetheless, eyeing the shop’s interior like it might snap at her with her arms crossed lazily across her chest. She walks up to the register, and finally settles her gaze on the two baristas in front of her.

“This place open all night?” The girl runs a hand through her dirty blonde hair, gone stringy from the rain. There’s a worn carpet bag under one of her arms.

“That’s what the sign says,” Johanna says. Brianna elbows her, but the blonde girl smiles.

“What can we get for you?” Brianna pipes up. The girl looks straight at her now, and dons a crooked grin that Brianna hasn’t seen any other person wear quite the way this girl wears it.

She scans the menu behind them for five or so seconds, and then looks back at Brianna. “Just a coffee.”

Brianna nods and Johanna clicks the numbers into the register.

As Brianna slides the mug across the counter to the girl, she is caught off guard by her heavily-adorned hands -- her fingers are stacked with rings, her wrists piled with bands and bracelets. Brianna wonders what they all mean. She gets a feeling of permanence from the way the jewellery is placed, curious but natural nonetheless, like they’re tattoos rather than accessories.

“I like your, uh, rings,” Brianna says. Her face becomes hot and she feels stupid, but she isn’t sure why. She tries to smile at the girl.

“Oh, these? Thank you, I stole them all.” She takes the mug in both hands, smiles that peculiar smile, and walks to a chair in the far left end of the shop.

-

When it’s well and truly nighttime outside, around two hours later at 9:00, the shop has taken on its usual steady drip of people coming in and out, some taking up residence on an armchair with a book and staying put well into the wee hours of the morning, some coming in in couples or threes to chat and then head to the bars. And others, as Brianna expected, are utter oddities, like the man with the book Johanna told her about, who has returned that night to his spot in the corner. There’s also a woman with a small shopping trolley, who sits on the coffee-rum sofa with a cup of tea, muttering to herself, and a lanky young man who stares into his coffee mug without drinking it, and darts out every twenty minutes for a cigarette.

Brianna supposes she lumps the jewellery thief girl in with these weirdos. The girl hasn’t budged, she just sits in that chair, nursing the coffee that’s probably well cold by now, and scribbles in a yellow writing pad.

“...And so the girl says, ‘yeah, and jail is just a room’.” Johanna’s back to her crocheting. “Bri? Are you even listening? It’s supposed to be funny.”  
  
Brianna looks at her. “It was funny, sorry, Jo.”

Johanna’s eyes narrow. “What are -- are you alright?”

“Yes, I’m fine. I just…that girl’s been here quite a long time, hasn’t she?” Brianna looks away from Johanna and begins stacking espresso shot glasses by the milk steamer.

“Who, the one with the carpet bag?”

“Yes, her.”

“Yeah, if you start working nights more often you’ll see that. People come in, get a coffee and then just lounge about all night.”

“Have you seen her before? You said a lot of the…outlandish ones are regulars.”

“Oh, no, I’ve never seen her. The bloke with the book, the smoker, the granny with the tea, yes. But no, I don’t think I’ve seen Carpet Bag.”

-

There’s a slump around 1 AM, three-quarters through Brianna’s shift, where the shop is nearly empty, but for a giggling couple on the coffee-rum sofa, and the Carpet-Bag Jewellery-Thieving girl. Johanna has finally stuffed her crocheting away for good and has taken to washing up the considerable stack of dirty mugs and plates in the bin by the counter.

As Brianna begins wiping down around the espresso machine and the cash register, she hears the clink of porcelain, and she looks up.

“Could I bother you for another coffee?” Carpet Bag Jewellery Thief.

Brianna looks back at her blankly for a moment too long. The girl raises her eyebrows and chuckles a little, her tongue darting out between her teeth when she does.  
“Yes, of course, sorry,” Brianna says. She gulps and takes the mug from the girl’s hands.

It’s quiet between them while Brianna rinses the mug and begins pouring another coffee.

“When’s your birthday?” The girl says.

“Hm?” Brianna looks at her, taken aback.

The girl’s staring at her, leaning on her elbow on the counter, her thumb brushing against her lips slightly. “When’s your birthday?”

“Why?” Brianna’s face gets warmer the longer she looks at the girl’s round eyes, which are somehow wise and youthful at the same time. She sets the mug down between the two of them.

“Just tell me,” the girl chuckles, reaching for the mug.

“July nineteenth,” Brianna says.

“Cancer! I was guessing between that and…Capricorn, perhaps,” she takes a sip of the coffee, holding it by the rim. “I just got the feeling. Hm.”

“I don’t…I don’t think I really believe in any of that,” Brianna smiles and tightens her ponytail.

“Ooh, a skeptic,” the girl crooks an eyebrow. “What’s your name?”

“Brianna.”

The girl holds out a ring-clad hand. “Regina.”

Brianna takes her hand. It’s warm from the coffee, but for the cool metal of the rings.

“Are you from ‘round here?” Brianna asks. “I don’t think I’ve…we haven’t seen you in before. We’re not too popular for tourists or anything like that.”

“Oh, no. I’m just bouncing from place to place right now, really. Don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.” She shrugs.

“Don’t waste your whole visit cooped up in here, it’s right boring,” Brianna smiles.

“No, it’s perfect. I’ve gotten loads done.”

“What do you do?”

“A bit of everything.”

Brianna waits for more and Regina doesn’t give it. Then, Regina says, “How much longer do you work this evening, Brianna?”

“Oh, I’m off in…” she looks at her watch. “’Round two hours.” Then she gulps. “Why?”

“I want to get a drink with you.”

Brianna is a cautious girl almost all of the time. She has learned to be this way from experience, which most people don’t expect of her -- she knows what they see when they look at her. She knows she’s straight-laced and proper for the most part, and this is just fine with her. Usually. But it’s been a process, she tells herself, and that’s what none of them know. She wasn’t always this way. It was an accumulation of one thing after the other, until one day, she realised she’d become somewhat dull at 23.

She does something bold and unplanned every once in a while and surprises herself. Over the summer, her, Johanna, and Melina had gotten matching tattoos on a whim. The winter before that, the three of them had gotten absolutely pissed at a New Year’s Eve party, and then as they were stumbling home, Melina found a stray cat and took it back to the flat they all shared at the time. She’d even named it that night, but when they all woke up the next day, none of them could remember its name. She settled once again on the name Romeo, but the original name was forgotten forever. And the summer before _that_ , Brianna decided she wanted a nose ring, and she let Melina and Johanna try to pierce it for her in their kitchen with a sewing needle. She still has a scar on her left nostril.

But on the day-to-day, she keeps her head down, and scurries from her flat to the coffee shop and then back again on a sometimes-torturous loop. She doesn’t date much and she hangs out almost exclusively with Melina and Johanna. This way of life very rarely presents problems.

“You want to get a drink with me?” Brianna repeats, a hesitant smile finding its way onto her lips.

For the first time that night, Regina looks caught off balance. Her already saucer-sized eyes widen just a bit, and she looks down at her coffee. “I mean, if you want to. I don’t know. I like…the thing I like best about travelling around is meeting new people, and you seem…I don’t know. I-”

“No, no, I -- it sounds fun. Let’s do it. I mean, let’s…grab that drink. If you’re not bothered waiting around for two more hours, that is,” Brianna’s heart is fluttering angrily like a small hammer.

“I’m not bothered at all. You know where to find me.” Regina grins, a bit crooked, like her own smile has taken her off guard. She gestures with her mug to the back of the shop, where the chair she’d vacated is waiting to welcome her back.

-

“So you’ve agreed to go on a date with a stranger, then?” Johanna says, stacking clean mugs under the counter.

“Everyone starts as a stranger, Jo,” Brianna’s slumped over, leaning on her elbows with her chin in her hands.

“She probably has drugs in that carpet bag.”

“You hoard drugs all over your apartment.”

“Those are Mel’s drugs. I hoard liquor. I thought you knew me better, Bri.” Johanna stands up and looks at Brianna. “Where are you going to go, anyway? It’ll be three by the time you’re off.”

Brianna shrugs. “There’s a little diner with drinks that’s…dunno, a half-hour walk. Should be alright.”

Johanna tilts her head and narrows her eyes.

“You and Melina are the ones always telling me to, what, spread my wings, broaden my horizons, aren’t you? I’m doing it.” Brianna says. “And I never said it was a date. It’s not.”

Johanna still looks wary. “Just be safe, yeah? And call Mel and I if you need a lift.”

-

  
Regina has a car. For some reason, Brianna hadn’t pictured this being the case, but when it came around to 3 AM and she ambled out of the shop with Regina in toe, Regina said, “I’m just in that car park in front of the shop down here a bit.”

“You’ve got a car?”

“Oh, yeah, it’s fantastic. I mean, it’s utter rubbish. Absolute shit, but it drives. And it’s better than walking from city to city. One day I’d like a proper car, something real nice.”

The car is a van that smells like cigarettes and mud, badly veiled by a heavy sweet perfume. Brianna can’t help but feel as if she might have made a mistake as they peel out of the Tesco car park. The backseat of the van looks like a makeshift bed, and she eyes what might be a half-empty bottle of gin stuffed under a pillow jostling as they turn onto the main road.

‘If it’s a mistake, it will be an interesting mistake,’ Brianna thinks.

“Do you…” Brianna almost asks Regina if she lives in this van, but she stops herself. “Where are you from?”

“Last place I lived was California. But I haven’t been settled in one spot for a few months now.”

Brianna learns Regina’s a new photographer for an arts magazine in California, a photojournal called _Oculi_ , published six times yearly.

“It’s my first gig,” Regina explains. “I was doing things in local galleries but this is a big step up, it’s real. I’d been doing some intern work for them, but they’re taking a chance on my stuff.”

“What do you like to photograph?” Brianna says.

“Musicians, other artists. Anything that catches my eye. An empty juice carton in the gutter, some chalk graffiti on a brick wall…a pretty girl,” Regina winks at her as she turns the van onto a busy road.

Brianna stops breathing for a few seconds. “Oh, do you play music?” Her voice cracks a little.

Regina smirks. “Yeah, drums. Do you?”

“Guitar.”

They talk favorite music and influences as they get nearer to the diner. Then, once they’re inside the small, greasy place, the conversation circles back to art. And Brianna pulls them into the territory of science after that, which she’s surprised Regina knows a great deal about.

Regina is not quite like anyone Brianna has met before, and this realisation continues to crest over her sporadically like a hot flash the longer they get to know one another. Regina’s an eclectic well of curios and sketches, yet presents herself with such cohesion and honesty. Brianna is content to listen to her talk and tell stories or go on tangents for as long as Regina wants to tell them.

“Tell me about this one,” Brianna says through a tired giggle, pointing to the ring on Regina’s left middle finger. They’re halfway through their third hour in the diner, wedged into a red booth in the back by a steamed-up window. Brianna’s body feels disconnected and soft with sleepiness. She’s toying with a sugar packet with one hand, and the other rests near Regina’s on the table. Regina’s got her left hand palm-down, fingers spread, and her other hand laid slump next to an empty old-fashioned glass.

“That turquoise one in the middle?” Regina says. “I nicked that from my mum when I was…ten or eleven, I must’ve been.” She laughs shortly.

“She know you took it?” Brianna’s voice slurs slightly from tiredness and she yawns.

“Probably figured it out, yeah,” Regina smiles. Then she says, “We’d better get you home safe, you’ve about had it, I think.”

“’M fine,” Brianna says. But her eyes are resting closed against her efforts to keep them open, and she’s having a hard time fighting the urge to just rest her head in her arms and drift off then and there.

She hears Regina laugh to herself as she slides out of the booth and stands up. “Alright, come on. Up. Let’s get you back, yeah?”

Brianna feels Regina’s hand on her upper arm, pulling her to her feet. She lets Regina lead her out of the diner and into the misty half-light.

“What time is it?” Brianna mumbles, leaning against Regina as they walk towards the van.

“Half past six A.M.,” Regina helps Brianna into the passenger’s side.

“Aren’t you sleepy too?” Brianna says as Regina gets in and starts the van.

Regina shrugs. “Not as much as you, I think.” She smiles and clicks the radio on as they pull onto the road. “Right, sleepy head, just try to stay awake till we get back to your flat, alright?”

Brianna mumbles half-cognizant directions to Regina back to her place. “Turn here…yeah, up here,” She says through a yawn when they’re nearing her street. “’M sorry for…for getting so tired all of a sudden, thought I’d be able to make it…longer.”

“Oh, don’t apologize. You’re a working girl.”

Regina parks the van along the curb by Brianna’s building. Just as she’s pulling the keys from the ignition and opening the door, Brianna says,

“Where are you going to go?”

Regina stops. “Hm?”

Brianna’s voice is low and tired, but clear. “Where are you going to next? After this? Are you just…are you leaving?” She opens her eyes and stares at Regina.

“I…well, I don’t really know yet quite where I’m going, but…” Regina sighs. “I mean, that’s how it is. I don’t stay anywhere too long.”

Brianna bites the inside of her cheek and nods slowly, wearily. Regina gets out of the van then and Brianna’s close behind.

“Let me help you get up safe,” Regina says. “Got your keys?”

Brianna nods, slamming the passenger’s side door and squinting in the early sunlight. She feels mournful but calm, like someone returning home from a long adventure. She feels Regina’s hand on her shoulder ushering her forward towards the building.

“Blimey, you’re tall. I’m not even very short and you make me feel tiny,” Regina laughs next to her and Brianna can’t help but let out a drowsy giggle.

She lets them into the building’s lackluster, dusty lobby and then to the elevators, and then up to the fifth floor and down the familiar-smelling hallway. They’re quiet, but it’s a content quiet Brianna is only used to experiencing with close friends. Her heart twinges a little.

They’re standing outside Brianna’s door and she finds herself not wanting to go inside.

“Do you want me to do it for you?” Regina laughs and reaches for the keys in Brianna’s hand.

“Don’t go,” Brianna blurts out.

“What?”

“Don’t go. I don’t want you to leave.”

Regina lets a small, sad smile cross her lips as she looks at her. “It really has been a fun night, hasn’t it?”

“I really…I really like spending time with you,” Brianna says. “I know you move around lots and we’ve just met, but…I don’t want this to be the last time I see you. I really don’t want you to leave yet.”

Regina’s expression is gentle, but difficult to read, and for a moment, Brianna thinks she’s scared her off. Then, she says in a soft voice, “Then I won’t leave yet.”  
Inside, Brianna promptly passes out on her bed, and Regina falls asleep easily on the threadbare sofa, just as the sun begins to fill the little bedsit with clean, yellow light.


	2. girlie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a burned finger, supermarket fluff, and #justphotopgrapher things
> 
> (girlie- alexandra savior)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi!  
> thank u for the kudos and comments on chapter 1! this will probably have frequent updates because i really like writing it to de-stress and distract myself from my original works, because i get awful writer's block.  
> hope you like this one too.  
> <3  
> \- soph

_two - girlie_

_she ’s always looking for a wilder ride_  

Regina sleeps all morning and into the afternoon, and it’s raining again when she wakes up, curled up sideways on Brianna’s torn-up floral-print sofa.

It’s a clang and then a yelp that wakes her up. She props herself up on her elbows and sees Brianna in the tiny kitchen, her back to her, fiddling with something by the stove.

“Brianna?” Regina says, her voice reedy and tired.

“Did I wake you?” She replies quickly and looks over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, it’s just…I just burnt my finger a bit.”

“Are you alright?” She sits up and rubs her eyes with the heel of her palm.

“Yeah. Ah…damn it.”

Regina gets up and walks into the kitchen, peering around Brianna to see what she’s doing. She’s squeezing the tip of her right pointer finger between the pointer and thumb of her left hand, squinting at the little blister forming there. Regina’s arm brushes against Brianna’s hip as she reaches around the taller girl to turn off the stove’s burner. She feels Brianna jerk very slightly at the touch.

“Sorry,” Regina mumbles.

“You just surprised me is all.”

Regina clears her throat and then becomes occupied fiddling with a cheap copper ring on her pinkie, until Brianna says,

“I dropped my teaspoon in there.” Regina looks up at her; she’s hunched over the cooling stove top. There’s a small silver teaspoon wedged between the coils of the burner, which Regina realises must have been the clanging noise from earlier.

“What were you doing stirring up the stove top, love?” Regina says with a short chuckle.

Brianna huffs. “I wasn’t. I was trying to make tea,” she gestures to a little white mug to her right. “But I moved the kettle off the burner and then knocked my spoon in there and b-burnt my finger trying to get it out.”

“Only joking,” Regina says. She steps around Brianna and bumps her hip a little with hers. “Budge up, I’ll get it out.”

Regina hovers a hand over the stove’s coils, and then grips the teaspoon’s handle with the tips of her fingers gingerly, wiggles it free, and places it beside Brianna’s tea with a gentle clatter.

Brianna smiles. “I promise I’m not that clumsy all the time,” she says with a little shake of her head.

“Did you sleep well?” Regina asks.

“I was completely gone the moment my head touched the pillow,” Brianna’s looking at her burnt finger again as she grabs her teacup with her good hand. “Oh, damn, let me make you a cup, too. Sorry.”

“I’ll do it,” Regina says, pushing Brianna’s hand away. “Are you alright? You seem on edge.”

Brianna sighs and picks up her cup. “Yes. I’m fine.”

“Oh, come now. I’m not stupid.”

Brianna looks taken aback. “It's just...” She takes a sip of her tea as Regina reaches above the stove to rummage for a mug on a shelf.

“Where do you keep your -- oh, here,” she finds them in the cupboard to the left of her. “I’m too bloody short for this.” She gets on the tips of her toes, her left hand barely brushing the handle of a yellow mug.

Brianna steps forward and grabs the cup, lowering it into Regina’s hand. Then she looks down at her, pausing for just a brief moment. Regina smiles her lopsided smile that always seems to find its way onto her lips by accident.

“What were you saying?” Regina clears her throat and grabs a teabag from the little box near the toaster. “Before my short legs interrupted our conversation?”

Brianna grins at her. “Oh, it’s nothing. Really. Just my finger hurts a bit.” She lifts up her arms and arches backwards to stretch. “I’m a bit off when I wake up.”

Regina takes her tea back to the sofa and sits cross-legged, staring out the single-hung windows at the moss-strewn side of the flats next door. Brianna sits next to her.

“Hey, thank you for letting me stay here,” Regina says, her voice gentle. “I know it’s strange because we just met and all. But if you hadn’t offered…I’d have just spent another night in my van breathing in the smells of dirt and spilled gin for ten hours.”

Brianna looks over at her and there’s a little smile on her lips. “It was nothing.”

They don’t talk much as they finish their tea; the two of them still slightly bogged by sleep and the weariness of an extremely late morning. Regina doesn’t say so, but she loves this flat, despite it being teeny and a little broken. It isn’t like the apartment she lived in in California, which was cold and new in a horrible way, like a freshly-built coffin. It smelled like paint and fresh vinyl fumes all the time and nothing Regina did seemed to be able to make the place feel like hers, feel _lived_ in. Brianna’s flat, however, feels like belongs to somebody, like each piece of furniture and each dent in the wall and each loose hinge on the cupboard doors is a bit of the woman who lives there. There’s a little row of flower planters made from egg cartons on the window sill, with tiny sprouts popping up in each one. Her bed in the corner is all disarranged white sheets, plain but comfortable-looking and low to the floor. Next to it, there’s a half-full glass of water. Against the wall opposite the foot of her bed is a turntable on a little rickety table, and there’s a create of records that Regina’s compelled to peruse through.

She likes the flat, but she gets a little wistful looking around at it. She’s forgotten what a homey space feels like.

When she gulps down the last of her tea, Regina says, “I was hoping to get out and take some pictures today.”

“Oh?” Brianna looks over at her.

“Mmhm. Whereabouts are you planning to go today?”

“I hadn’t really…well, I s’pose I have a few errands to run. Would you like to come along?”

-

Brianna wants to go to the supermarket first, so Regina drives them across town to the one that carries the brand of almond milk Brianna prefers. Any time she isn’t driving, she has her camera out, hanging around her neck.

“I try to have it out all the time,” Regina explains. “I don’t want to miss anything.”

“Miss anything?”

“Yes,” Regina says as they walk into the supermarket, their heads bowed against the rain. “What if something really lovely happens and I miss it?”

“That must be very tiring sometimes.” Brianna smiles.

“How do you mean?” Regina grabs them a trolley.

“To always be on high alert like that,” she guides them towards the produce. “Always be looking _for_ things, instead of just _at_ them. Don’t you get tired of it?” Brianna’s turned away from her, picking up two large oranges and comparing them.

Regina lifts the camera’s viewfinder to her right eye, squeezes the left shut, and centers it on the back of Brianna’s curly head. She presses the shutter button.

Brianna spins around. “Did you just--?”

Regina raises her eyebrows. “Maybe.”

“I haven’t showered yet today and I think I’ve still got last night’s makeup on,” Brianna groans, putting both oranges in a plastic bag and grabbing the trolley.

“Oh, be quiet.”

As an artist, Regina finds herself _watching_ a lot. She loves faces, mannerisms, peculiarities, contrasts and little bits of life that make it not so hard. She is quite silly, flighty, and often irresponsible; she is impulsive. In every area of her life, except for her art, this is what her father calls her biggest flaw. _But flaws are circumstantial,_ she tells herself. _I am reckless, and that wouldn’t serve me well in any life other than an artist’s. I make good art because I do it impulsively._

Sometimes she doesn’t believe this, and she just spends the day feeling bad about herself, replaying in her mind the bitter silences over family dinners, the astringent sighs from her mother and shaky glances from her father.

She knows many people, like her parents, see her as a delusional, broke, starving artist who’s dead from the neck up. She did well in school, but could be a little daft sometimes when she got carried away thinking about things or daydreaming or whatever else. And though she wears her dumb blonde badge with pride, she knows she is more intelligent and observant than anyone thinks she is. Not extraordinarily, but she is more than a silly girl artist with a loud laugh and a big ego. She notices things, she captures things, she stares at things and she looks at people as potential art.

People like Brianna. Regina catches herself staring at her every few minutes. She minds the small things Brianna does as they amble through the supermarket in relative silence, Brianna focused intently on her grocery list. Like how she scratches her cheek absentmindedly with her middle finger, how her eyes always look a little bit sleepy, how her big hair flounces about when she turns or walks or does anything.

“Is your hair naturally like that?” Regina asks as they push the trolley down the isle.

“Yes. I used to hate it, but I got exhausted straightening it every day.” Brianna chuckles softly as she pulls of loaf of bread from a shelf.

“You didn’t like it? Why not?” Regina says. “It works so well with your face.”

“Does it?” Brianna looks down at her.

“Yes,” she nods. “You’ve got this long, elegant, nose, and these deep eyes…” Regina waves her hand a bit, gesturing to Brianna’s features as she references them, like she’s critiquing a work of art. “And your brow line is gentle, but strong in its own way. It all works with the big curls. Makes you look like a painting.”

Brianna feels warm suddenly. “That’s…I mean…blimey, thanks. I didn’t know you...I didn’t know people noticed stuff that way.”

“People don’t, I do.”

Brianna looks down at her list again. Her hand is quivering ever so slightly, her burnt finger tucked against her thumb.

“And you’ve got a great lower lip.” Regina tacks on.

Brianna’s head shoots up. Regina smirks, just a little bit. She is every bit as brazen and silly as people have said she is.

- 

After the supermarket, they drive out of the city, and up into the foggy hills.

“It’s great weather for spooky pictures,” Regina says.

Brianna has gone sort of quiet and Regina isn’t sure exactly why, but she has her looming suspicions.

 _You always do this_ , she thinks. _You give people the wrong idea and you sound like an obsessive mad woman. Long elegant nose? Great lower lip? Why just the lower lip?_

The city disappears in sheets of fog in Regina’s rear-view mirror. The trees are getting taller and denser, their leaves deep red and burnt orange, shuddering gently from the rain. She chances a glance over at Brianna. She’s holding a soft gaze out the windshield, her hair bouncing gently about her face every time the van hits a slight bump. Her expression is unreadable. Regina bites her cheek.

She pulls the van off the road next to a lookout point where there’s a thinning in the trees, and probably a very nice view of the city when the fog is clear. The tops of a few buildings pop up above the mist, but besides that, the clouds are so thick it could be an entrance to the void.

She shuts the van off and the silence is deeper than she was prepared for -- she hadn’t realised how much noise the van was making just driving along the gravely roads.

“I want to take some pictures over here,” Regina mutters as she takes the keys out of the ignition. “Are you coming along?”

Brianna doesn’t say anything for a moment, almost like she hadn’t heard, and she thinks they’re still driving. Then she looks at Regina suddenly, a little wide eyed. “Yes. Yes. Sorry. I’m sorry. Let’s…yeah.”

They walk to the edge of the cleared area where the trees start growing thick and close together again, and Regina crouches down, turning her camera longways.

“What’s your project about?” Brianna says. It takes Regina by surprise. She jolts a little bit and looks up and Brianna over her shoulder, still holding the camera in place.

“My what?’

“For the magazine. You’re…you said it’s your first gig. What does ‘gig’ mean for a photographer?”

Regina considers the question for a moment. “I was a contributor for this local paper in Sacramento…” she takes another picture, this time holding the camera diagonally. “But you get paid rubbish for that. Contributor’s just code for they’re paying you crumbs for your pictures. But I did my own pictures too. Did weddings. School pictures. I did this collection where I took photos -- regular California things, but only on rainy days. It was like inventing a new place, where there’s white beaches, and palm trees and all that, but with the illusion of constant rain.” She stands up, brushing gravel off her knees. “And this tiny local gallery took a chance on it, and so I just flitted around from exhibit to exhibit for about a year and then,” she raises her eyes and looks at Brianna. “ _Oculi_ took me on and I got my first gig a few months later. Essentially, it means I have a few months to get a photo essay or some collection together for the next issue. Don’t know what it’ll be yet.”

“So you just…got your assignment and took off?”

“Well, yeah. I’d been taking California pictures for years, it was getting quite old.”

“How are you paying for all this? Just… travelling around?”

“I live in my car, for one,” Regina says, more bitterly than she intended. She lifts the camera again, and zooms in on the fog-laden city, on the exposed building tops. “And they gave me a little bit of compensation. Not much. But a little.”

Brianna doesn’t say anything. Regina lowers the camera enough to peer over it, and walks forward briskly, her feet crunching against the gravel. She doesn’t see the larger rock in her path.

When she slips, she slips gracelessly. She yelps and twists, then comes down hard on her back. Immediately and to her horror, her eyes begin to prickle and sting.

“Regina,” Brianna is there, then she’s crouching beside her, her hands hovering uncertainly by Regina’s arm, as if she’s unsure whether she should touch her or not. “Let me -- let me help you.” She reaches her hand towards Regina’s.

“I’m fine,” Regina says. She waves Brianna’s hand away and rolls onto her knees, checking to make sure her camera’s okay as she stands up. Except it’s difficult to see through the traitorous tears rushing against her lower lash line. She blinks furiously.

Regina hears the gravel crunching and she knows Brianna is behind her.

“The camera alright?” Brianna asks in a small voice.

“It’s fine,” Regina’s voice is higher-pitched than she would like. She walks off again, to another side of the clearing, readying her camera as she goes.

She waits for the weepy, tight feeling in her throat to pass, and then she feels bad. She looks back at Brianna, standing all lanky and unsure next to the van, looking at her burnt finger. Regina feels a smile twitch against her lips.

She turns her back to the trees, and lifts the camera. With one hand on the zoom ring, she hones in on Brianna, her head bowed, her nose just visible beneath her hair. She presses the button.

Then she lets the camera hang by its strap around her neck, and walks back to Brianna.

“Brianna,” she says as she approaches. Brianna looks up, surprise in her eyes. Regina wonders what she was thinking about. “Did I scare you, earlier? With all my talk about…well, with the things I said in the shop?”

Brianna frowns for a moment, then understanding dawns across her face. “No. No, you didn’t. It’s me. I’m…” she slumps against the van. “I’m not…good at -- well, things like this.”

“Things like what?”

She chews the edge of her lower lip. “New people. Kind people.”

Regina stares, gently. Brianna continues.

“Not that the world’s been particularly unkind to me. It hasn’t. I just mean that…I am, um…I’m very accustomed to being looked over and invisible. And I don’t mind it, that’s not a complaint. I am fine being in the background. I suppose I’m just not used to…” she swallows and looks at Regina. “People paying attention.”

Regina walks slowly to her, holding her gaze, and then leans against the van next to her. “Well, if we’re going to be spending more time together,” Regina says through a sigh. “You’d better get used to it.”

Brianna looks down at her, and she’s silent for a beat, and then she grins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi again!  
> i might keep this book going beyond the 20 chapters, do one-shots or something. if you have anything in particular you want to read, let me know. also, would anyone be interested in having smut in this book???? let me know  
> \- soph


	3. lovelier girl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> anxiety!brianna, a party invitation, and a blackout
> 
> (lovelier girl - beach house)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hiya!  
> this is a bit of a gloomy one, sorry. bri's anxious. i'm a liiiittle bit tipsy right now but i just really wanted to write this because i looOOoOve reg and bri so much. such sweeties. much kisses to you all.  
> \- soph
> 
> CW: anxiety

_three - lovelier girl_

_wanting you here, living in fear_

Somehow it happens without either of them speaking about it or making formal arrangements. Regina spends every night of the next two weeks on Brianna’s couch. Every morning, Brianna makes tea. She’s careful not to burn her finger again. She gets cups for both her and Regina, because Regina can’t reach where Brianna keeps them. They sit on the sofa and look out the window. If it’s a work day, Brianna jets off to the Northwest Moon, and Regina stays out all day taking pictures.

It’s nearly five in the evening and Brianna is almost off work. She has a surprisingly long line of customers, but she can see Regina out of the corner of her eye, leaning against a bookshelf at the end of the shop, flipping through a stack of photos.

The man next in line at the register looks like his head might pop off, so Brianna sighs deeply and pretends Regina isn’t there.

Melina’s working the espresso machines, calling out orders as they’re prepared. Brianna hasn’t fully introduced Regina to her two best friends, and she’s somewhat nervous to do so.

“So, this is the new Brianna?” Johanna had said when they’d talked on the phone the day before. “Inviting strangers to live with you. And she’s a _photographer _?__  No one who says they’re a photographer is really a photographer. It’s a line.”

“She doesn’t live with me. She’s working and she needs somewhere to stay.” Brianna had replied flatly. “And she _is_ a photographer. For a real magazine and everything.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Johanna said. “Mel too.”

Brianna knows they’re just looking out for her, because they’re right; she hasn’t been her usual self that week. During the afternoons and evenings she usually would have spent either alone, or with Johanna and Melina over, she was with Regina.

_But it’s nice not to be Boring Brianna for once, isn’t it? It’s fun to be the Brianna that befriends strangers and takes risks,_ she thinks. _Regina wouldn’t be friends with Boring Brianna._

Brianna thinks being around Regina is like being in a deep, doped-out daydream that she doesn’t even realize she’s lost in until something or someone reminds her what real life is like. Having to leave for work each day gets harder and harder; she’d much rather listen to Regina tell stories or fiddle with her camera. Even when she isn’t saying anything, something about her is enthralling, fleeting but permanent; like the best part of a song but drawn out forever. Last week after one of Brianna’s shifts, she’d come home to find Regina gone, with a piece of paper on the countertop saying she was out taking pictures. Brianna wasn’t expecting it, but her afternoon felt drab, empty, almost aggravating without Regina there, even though she used to love her lonely afternoons before she met the blonde girl. When Regina returned after sundown, Brianna had this lingering, tipsy smile on her face at the sight of her, and Regina asked her if she was stoned.

 

The line of customers finally starts to go down, but not until 15 minutes after Brianna was supposed to clock out and go home. Melina is breathing deeply, wiping the her forehead with the back of her hand.

“My God,” she says with a little smile in Brianna’s direction. Brianna’s wiping around the cash register. “They nearly did us in, darling, but we made it. Take care of yourself tonight, alright?” Melina tilts her head ever so slightly in Regina’s direction, almost so subtly that Brianna doesn’t notice it.

“Don’t need to worry about me, Mel, I’m always very safe.” Brianna pulls the scrunchy out of her hair and shakes her head.

“Me and Jo want to meet her. Call her over, will you?” Melina begins cleaning off the espresso machine.

“Not tonight, Mel, we -- I’ve got to get going,” Brianna unties her apron.

Melina rolls her eyes a little and then lets out a big, overdrawn sigh. “Oh, but of course. Well, dear, me and Jo are having a little party tomorrow evening and you aren’t working, so I expect you and your new pet to be there.”

Brianna washes her hands with her back turned to Melina, but smiles all the same. “She isn’t my pet.”

“Oh, fine. Girlfriend, then.”

“She isn’t my girlfriend, either!”

“Festivities will begin at nine, Bri. It’s going to be a ball.”

Brianna turns around. “I don’t know.”

Melina looks at her black-painted fingernails for a moment and sighs. “Me and Jo have missed you lately, darling.”

Brianna’s chest twinges and she crosses her arms. “I miss you girls too.”

Melina looks up, and raises her eyebrows slightly.

“I’ll be there,” Brianna says a bit hesitantly, grabbing her jacket and keys from the hook near the back room. “Me and Regina will be there.”

-

Brianna can’t get Melina and Johanna’s criticisms out of her mind. It is mainly Melina who gets to her -- Johanna is a bit sardonic with her remarks, bitingly teasing, but Melina does little to veil her concern for Brianna. She feels guilt settling in her stomach as she lays on the hardwood floor next to Regina, listening to a Hendrix record.  

The hazy disillusioned bubble that has thus far clouded her judgement when she’s around Regina isn’t returning like it usually has when Brianna gets off work. And its absence makes her feel cold, detached from the girl next to her.

_They’re right _,__ Brianna thinks. _She’s a stranger. I don’t know her. This isn’t me. You can’t just let people show up and take over your life._

“I saw something today and it reminded me of you,” Regina says. Brianna turns her head to the side to look at her. “I was in the park, the posh one up on the hill, and this couple were walking together. An old couple, very sweet. They were walking their dog. A poodle.” Regina reaches her right hand over to pull on a coil of Brianna’s hair. She laughs.

Brianna can’t help the smile that crosses her lips. “Did you take a picture?”

“I don’t need any more poodle photos, I’ve got a good few of you already.”

“I see.” Brianna scoots closer to Regina to bump her shoulder with a chuckle.

After a few comfortable but wordless moments, the A-side of the record is finishing up, so Regina gets up to flip it.

“Hey,” Brianna says as Regina’s crouched by the turntable. “So, Melina and Johanna. I told you about them, they’re my best mates? They’re having a party tomorrow at their flat.”

“Oh?” Regina places the needle on the edge of the record and crawls on her hands and knees to lay back down next to Brianna. “A party?” She raises her eyebrows.

“Yeah.” Brianna’s throat tightens at the provocative glint that passes Regina’s eyes.

“That could be fun,” Regina says. “D’you want to go?”

“Do __you__ want to go?”

“Oh, don’t do that,” Regina pokes her in the arm. “And it’s a party, yes, I want to go. I want to meet these _Johanna_ and _Melina_ characters. Properly. Johanna’s the one who was there on the first day I came in, yeah?”

“Yes. They want to meet you too,” Brianna says, unwittingly flat.

“Something wrong?” Regina says through a soft chuckle, looking at Brianna.

Brianna looks at her too and her heart thumps. “I’m worried you won’t like each other.”

“What’s wrong with them?” Regina says. “What are they, Jesus freaks? Or just completely bland? Why won’t I like them, hmm?” She’s flashing a teasing grin, but Brianna can’t muster even a weak smile in return.

“No,” Brianna says. “They’re very interesting and exciting girls. But…I just…I…” She looks up at the ceiling, at the shapes in the stucco, the crooked mental sketches of butterflies and dogs. “Okay, it’s…it’s not them that’s totally bland, it’s me.”

Regina doesn’t say anything at first, and Brianna doesn’t see her move out of the corner of her eye. So she continues.

“I guess I’m just worried…” she sighs and then lifts her hands to cover her face, pressing her palms into her eyes. “I’m worried…I don’t know, I just…”

She’s starting to sound overwrought, and she knows it, and this only makes it worse.

_Don’t do this now,_ she thinks. _Not over something this silly. Calm down. Calm down. Right now._

Then it’s dark and quiet. Brianna hears a small gasp from Regina and feels her jerk next to her, followed by a deep, persistent silence.

“Power out?” Regina says at a whisper.

“Think so,” Brianna whispers back.

They lay in the total darkness for a few moments, with just the sound of their breathing, Brianna’s quick and sharper, Regina’s quiet and deep.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” Regina asks.

Brianna tries her very hardest to draw in a deep breath, and succeeds part way before feeling lightheaded. “No,” she says.

She’s grateful in part for the power outage. The sudden shock of total, silent darkness deflated the bubble of panic she’d felt swelling in her chest. She tries to breathe deep again, and again. She is also grateful that Regina doesn’t point this out -- she just lies there next to her, the warmth of her body just tangible against her arm, the sounds of her slow breathing like a gentle, pulsing rhythm to rock Brianna back to earth.

After she calms down, she is sleepy.

“Brianna,” Regina says in a soft voice. “Do you have any candles?”

 

The soft candlelight makes the living room look like a ritual ground. Brianna sits on the sofa, feeling a little weightless, yet undeniably heavy.

“It looks romantic, almost,” Regina says, pacing the hardwood floors with her hands held out just slightly from her sides, like she’s a ballerina keeping balance. “Like some godawful grand gesture.” She chuckles and looks at Brianna.

Regina walks over to her, stepping lightly, almost skipping, and sits next to her.

“Do you want to talk about what you were saying earlier?” she asks.

“Hm?” Brianna’s staring at one flickering strand of candlelight on the windowsill by her bed.

“Before the power went out. You were worried,” Regina says, her voice notably gentler. “Said something about…you’re ‘bland’ or something rubbish like that.”

Brianna tries to chuckle. “I don’t know, sorry. I have little…nervous breaks, I guess you could call them. Sometimes. ‘S just how I am.”

She feels Regina’s fingers brush hers and she looks down. Brianna’s hand is resting on her knee, and Regina’s pointer and middle fingers are drawing slow, leisurely circles on the back of it. Then she feels Regina put her head on her shoulder. And exhaustion hits Brianna again, the feeling of a warm, breathing body against her making her head dizzy with drowsiness.

 

Being extremely anxiety-prone, Brianna often pulls on multiple threads of nervousness and dread at once, and she is acutely aware of almost all of them, almost all of the time. Her plentiful solitude in her twenties thus far has trained her to do this. She is relentlessly tuned into herself like a television channel, a sort of necessary, protective self-absorption. She knows it’s detrimental to her to be in her head all the time, so she keeps herself busy and keeps up with Melina and Johanna, but almost all other activities and people wear her out. Except Regina.

Yet, Regina is the catalyst for the two nervous threads Brianna is picking presently. _One,_ she thinks as she steps in the shower the morning of Melina and Johanna’s party. _I am placing too much trust in this girl too quickly and she is going to know too many things about me before it’s the right and proper time for her to know them._

She turns on the water.

_Two,_ she thinks. _I’m going to fall for this girl. It’s going to happen. I can feel it._

She doesn’t realise it’s true until she lets the thought run over and over again in her mind like a fly trapped in a glass. _I’m going to fall in love with Regina, aren’t I?_

She knows she isn’t in love yet because she knows what being in love feels like, but she also knows that Regina makes her feel safer in a way no boyfriend ever did; in a way that isn’t smothering or possessive or aggressive.

_It’s too fast it’s too fast it’s too fast it’s too fast,_ she thinks as she washes her hair. __I_ t’s going to be Tim all over again, I know it I know it I know it I k-_

There’s three quick knocks on the bathroom door. “Bri, I’m making tea, what sort do you want?” Regina calls.

“Peppermint,” Brianna hears herself say back.

 

 


	4. dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> drunk!maylor, two truths and a lie, and shameless flirting
> 
> (dreams - fleetwood mac)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! bit of a longer one. would love some comments, you all are so sweet <3  
> \- soph
> 
> CW: alcohol use

_four - dreams_

_like a heartbeat drives you mad_

Brianna knocks four times and it swings open almost immediately.

“Bri, darling! Ten minutes early, just as I suspected you’d be,” Melina smiles at Brianna and then looks at Regina standing shiftily at her side. “I’m Melina,” she holds out her hand. Regina nods and bears a polite grin as she shakes it.

Strangers are fresh meat to Regina, in that, she feels there’s something to be extracted, valued, and appreciated in every person she comes across. The greedy overtones of this aren’t lost on her. But she also has a real _love_ for all the people she meets in her travels, a real respect for their humanity _because_ of the things they show her, they way they fuel her art, the insights and inspirations they offer her simply by living, moving, breathing. Brianna has done this more than any of them. And so, for the first time in months, Regina is afraid to meet these new people. They aren’t just any new people, they’re _Brianna’s_ people.

Melina lets them in. The flat is dimly lit in lurid shades of red, pink, and violet, and the music playing hits Regina in her stomach first; it’s deep, thumping, rhythmic. There’s around four other people at the party so far, and a woman, who Regina recognizes as the barista who was working cashier the day she met Brianna.

“Jo, look who it is,” Melina says, turning to the woman who must be Johanna. “Bri and her friend are here.”

Johanna leaves the cluster of early arrivals and saunters over to them, tilting her head to one side, holding a cocktail glass. Regina cocks an eyebrow at her. Out of the corner of her eye, Regina sees Brianna shake her head slightly.

“Hello,” Johanna says, her voice slow and inviting. “Brilliant to meet you, at last.” She smirks and her eyes dart down to Regina’s sparkly pink trainers, which she keeps in her van in case of party-related emergencies, and up again, to her messy blonde hair.

“Jo. Oh, Christ. You get so cocky when you drink, darling. Stop that,” Melina grabs Johanna by her arm with a silly little grin on her mouth and pulls her towards the sitting room. Then she looks back at Brianna and Regina, still standing in the entryway, and says, “Pour yourselves some drinks, lovies, and then come have a chat with us.”

“My, the girl’s quite forward, isn’t she?” Regina chuckles, looking sideways and up and Brianna, whose cheeks are visibly reddened, even in the dim and warm lighting.

“I apologize for her…whatever that was,” Brianna murmurs, ushering them to the right into the kitchen. “Mel’s right, Jo gets this way when she’s around quarter way to being totally sloshed.”

“And Melina doesn’t mind?” Regina sees glasses, liquor bottles, syrups, and an ice bucket set out on the breakfast bar, so she grabs herself an old-fashioned glass.

“I mean, they’ve been together so long. Since before I knew them. I think they just know one another’s strange little things, you know? And they just go on with it.” Brianna says. “Mel gets dangerously melodramatic when she’s on the rag, and Johanna is a real tart when she drinks. Mel must know Johanna’d never mean anything by it.”

“Hmm, I don’t know, I _am_ quite delicious,” Regina scoops five ice cubes from the ice bucket into her glass then squints at the labels on the various bottles before her. “Perhaps our dear Johanna wants a piece.”

Brianna doesn’t say anything, just grabs a wine glass and snatches up a dark bottle among the clear and amber-colored ones.

“’M only joking, love,” Regina grasps the neck of a bottle of gin.

“I wonder who else they’ve invited,” Brianna mumbles absently, pouring the dark wine into her glass.

“Who’re all they? You know all of them?” Regina nods towards the sitting room and pours the gin a little sloppily, then puts it back.  

“Most of them are coworkers. Mel’s sister’s here too,” Brianna says. “I’m just hoping they didn’t invite…” She stops, sighs and takes a long sip of wine.

“Who?”

“Let’s go sit,” Brianna looks at Regina and then steps out of the kitchen.

 

“Regina, tell me about your photography, dear,” Melina says to her, her lips hovering around the rim of a champagne flute.

Regina and Brianna are squished together on a floral love seat, with Regina on the end nearest Melina, who’s perched on a quilted pouf.

“Oh,” Regina takes a sip of her drink, holding the glass on her knee and tapping it with her fingernails. “I’m working on a collection for a magazine called _Oculi_ at the moment.”

Regina likes Melina the longer she talks to her. Melina reminds her of herself, if she was nicer, and less self-absorbed. She can see why Brianna likes her.

Then, Johanna’s plopping herself into Melina’s lap. “Hold me, Mel,” she slurs after a tittering laugh.

Melina kisses her on the cheek and says something in her ear, so Regina adjusts herself slightly to look at Brianna.

“Having fun yet?” Regina says. Brianna’s sitting stiffly, her knees pressed together, staring across the room at the front door.

“Hey, Mel?” Brianna says suddenly and loudly, as if she hadn’t heard Regina. Melina pulls her lips away from Johanna’s and looks expectantly at Brianna. “You didn’t invite Tim, did you?”

“Goodness, no, of course I didn’t,” she says. “Why on earth would I do that?”

“Well, I mean,” Brianna stutters. “I know your sister still sees him from time to time at her work, so I just thought…since she’s here…” Her eyes dart over to a girl who looks like a younger version of Melina, standing by an open window, having a cigarette and talking animatedly to a blond man.

“Absolutely never in a million years would I invite that wankstain into my home,” Melina says and Johanna hums in agreement, still sitting across Melina’s legs.

“Sorry, but who’s Tim?” Regina looks between the three of them.

“Bri’s ex-boyfriend. Piss-poor excuse for a person,” Johanna blurts out and then sloshes a bit of her martini down her front when she lifts the glass to her lips. “It’s his fault she--”

“Okay, get up, Jo, no more drinks for you. The party’s not even in full swing yet and you’re already running your mouth, you silly thing,” Melina grabs Johanna by her shoulders and stands her up, leading her away.

Regina looks at Brianna, who’s in the process of pouring her entire glass of wine down her throat. Regina follows suit and takes a slow gulp from her gin.

 

Everyone arrives within the next 30 minutes. And within the next 30 minutes after that, everyone has taken to dancing in the sitting room, bodies made loose and elastic from the alcohol.

Even Brianna seems to be finally enjoying herself at last, after her second glass of wine and halfway into her third. She’s swaying in the corner with her eyes closed, a content expression on her face. Regina can’t help but smile as she watches her. Her legs seem to go on forever in her short velvet skirt, and her arms are so lanky, the hems of her floral jacket sleeves come up to her forearms. She’s like a limber, jello-y set of twigs as she bobs along to the beat of the music.

Regina pushes through clusters of people to get to Brianna, alone in her corner.

“Are you having a nice time?” Brianna asks slowly as Regina approaches. Brianna’s heavy-lidded eyes are only half open, but they look alive, sensuous.

“Most definitely,” Regina says, her words sliding together. She looks up at Brianna and a quavering grin crosses her lips.

“What’re you smiling for?” Brianna murmurs, stepping forward ever so slightly, shrinking the distance between them. The body of her wine glass clinks against Regina’s old-fashioned glass.

“Nothing,” Regina says, then she feels a giggle gush from her mouth before she can stop it. “You just look really pretty. Reaaaally pretty.”

Regina has her wits about her enough to understand the implications of what she’s doing, but she has no motivation to stop herself. She knows she wouldn’t say these things if it weren’t for the fact that she was three-quarters of the way done with her second drink. _But she is pretty, she’s really pretty_ , she thinks. _Just wanna tell her how pretty I think she is. She should know._

“So do you,” Brianna takes another sip. She’s a bit heavy handed with her movements and a drop of wine pools against her lower lip, and then slides down her chin. She doesn’t seem to notice.

Regina lifts her hand to the taller girl’s chin and swipes the spill up with her thumb. “Careful,” she says. “Don’t wanna ruin this lovely jacket.”

Brianna slows her swaying and looks at Regina with an intimate intensity.

“Everyone!” Melina yells to the room at large and the music dies down. Regina turns away from Brianna quickly, her cheeks burning. “We’re going to play a game. Everyone sit, sit.”

“The game’s Two Truths and a Lie,” Johanna explains, a bit sobered up now. “You think up two true things about yourself, and one lie, and then when it’s your turn, you say them. We’ll all guess the lie and whoever gets it wrong, drinks.” Melina gives her a stern glance. “Except for me, I’ll be drinking just juice for the rest of the night,” Johanna adds, with a sheepish smile.

Regina and Brianna squeeze back into the loveseat, this time less stiffly, less resistant to the other’s touch. Melina sits on the pouf again, with Johanna on the ground between her legs. On the sofa by the window is Melina’s sister and the blond boy, as well as a man with a mustache, and a woman with long brown hair.

“Does anyone else want to play?” Melina calls out, twisting around to look at the cluster of four or five people talking in hushed giggles in the kitchen, then the three gathered by the record player, and the six crowded around the breakfast bar. No one answers.

She gives them all three minutes to think up their two truths and one lie.

Melina’s sister Kashmira goes first. “You,” Kashmira says to Melina before begins her turn. “Sati, you’ll know it, so you can’t say anything.”

 _“Sati?”_ Regina whispers to Brianna.

“Mahsati is Melina’s given name,” Brianna mumbles. “She doesn’t let us call her that though.”

Kashmira goes, and Brianna, Regina, and the mustached man guess the incorrect lie. They all drink. Then the blond boy, Mark, has his turn, and everyone but Melina drinks.

When it’s Melina’s turn, she says, “Okay, mine are -- and you’ll probably know them, Jo, Bri, Kash -- One, I broke my left arm in primary school; two, I’m quite good at gymnastics; and three…I’ve never kissed a bloke.”

“There’s no way you’ve never kissed a man,” Brianna blurts out. Regina looks at her, surprised at the volume of her voice. “That’s the lie.”

Melina raises her eyebrows, then casts her gaze around the circle. “Anyone else have a guess?”

“I second Bri’s answer,” Regina says.

“I’m certain about this one, so I won’t say anything,” Johanna grins.

Kash nods. “Me, as well.”

Mark guesses the broken arm is the lie, but the mustached man and the brown haired girl second Brianna’s guess.

Melina stares at them all for a moment before bursting into a cackling laugh. “You fools. All of you but Mark. I’m a lifelong lesbian. Drink up!”

“That’s rubbish,” Brianna says. “I don’t believe it.”

Regina laughs next to her and takes a sip of her drink.

Johanna goes, and everyone guesses whether the lie is that she secretly loves ABBA, or that her favorite meal is sushi, or that she can’t ride a bike.

“Can’t stand sushi,” she says, and Regina, Mark, and the brown haired girl drink.

Regina feels so woozy she can hardly remember her two truths and one lie when it’s her turn. But she does.

“Alright, alright,” she says. Her face is very warm and the room is twisting and toppling slowly like a boat on choppy seas. “So, mine are: one, I’m terrified of spiders,” she pauses. “Two, I’m a fairly good chef; and three, I used to be engaged.”

Everyone considers her propositions in a content, tipsy silence, and then Johanna speaks up first.

“I’ll bet you can’t cook an egg,” she says with a little grin. Regina smirks at her and sucks on the inside of her cheek.

“Yes, I _do_ get the feeling you can’t be trusted to boil a pot of water,” Melina adds. “I mean no offense, dear, it’s just the truth.” Her and Johanna split into giggles.

“I don’t think you were engaged,” Brianna says in a small voice. Regina looks at her. She’s all tense again, arms folded, her wine glass still mostly full, resting on the side table. Regina feels a small pang of discomfort in her chest.

To Regina’s surprise, everyone guesses correct but Brianna. “How did you all know? Have I got _CAN’T COOK_  scrawled on my forehead?”

Everyone laughs, and then Melina directs her gaze at Brianna with a smirk on her lips. “Alright, B-”

Brianna gets to her feet unsteadily, holding her arms out slightly to keep balance. She steps around the coffee table and brushes past Johanna and Melina, then stumbles down a hallway adjacent the living room. Regina’s heart drops.

There’s a thick silence, broken only by the soft music. Even the clusters of other party attendees quiet their chatter as the sound of a door locking down the hallway sends an uncomfortable ripple through the room.

“Oh, really now,” Melina sighs. “That girl is so sensitive.”

Kash and Mark start breaking into their own conversation again, and Johanna has started trailing her fingers up Melina’s thigh. Regina places her drink on the coffee table, stands up and leaves the circle.

The hallway has two doors, one at the end and one on the left wall. She chances a guess that the room at the end is a bedroom, so she steps up to the other one cautiously and presses her ear to the door.

She can’t hear anything. She knocks twice softly. “Brianna, can I come in?”

Nothing. The music back in the living room has been turned up again, a pulsing beat cutting through the boozed-up chitchat.

“It’s just a game, Bri, it’s okay,” Regina continues. “I want to see you, can I please come in?”

There’s a small click and the door opens just enough for a long-fingered hand to grip Regina by the front of her shift and pull her in.

All the lights are off, but Regina can tell from the sound of a faucet dripping that it must be a bathroom. She stands stalk still, waiting for Brianna to turn to the lights on. But she doesn’t. She hears shuffling to her left.

“Where did you go?” Regina chuckles softly. Then she hears a sniffle. “Can I turn the lights on?”

“No,” Brianna answers quickly, her voice thick.

Regina thrusts out a hand to feel for a wall to her left, and then brushes her palm along it till it’s cold, smooth. Porcelain tile. She slides her hand downwards then, and hits the edge of something. She grips it. Bathtub.

She carefully sits on the cold edge. “Brianna, are you _in_ the bathtub?”

“It’s quite comfortable, actually,” Brianna sniffs again. “Nice and cold. A welcome rectification of my burning embarrassment.” She says, bitterly.

Regina stretches her arm behind her to grab the other side of the tub and then lets herself fall into it. She feels warmth next to her. “There you are,” she says. She puts a hand out tentatively and makes contact with a rough material. The jacket. Regina runs her hand up and down, assuming it’s Brianna’s arm or shoulder, and hoping the gesture is comforting.

“Why are you embarrassed, love? You’ve got not reason to be.”

No answer.

“It’s just a game. That’s the fun of playing, that you don’t get them all right, see? It’s alright.”

Brianna sighs. “But it was only _me_ who got it wrong, so I looked like an idiot, and now I look like even more of an idiot for running out of there like that. God, you must think I’m being an absolute drama queen.”

 _Yeah, sort of,_  Regina thinks. “No, I don’t think that, Bri, I just don’t want you to be sad.”

Slowly, Regina lets her head fall against Brianna’s shoulder, relieved when she doesn’t shove her off.

“You didn’t get your turn,” Regina says after a few silent moments. “Why don’t you tell me your two truths and a lie? Lemme have a crack at it.”

To Regina’s relief, she feels Brianna chuckle gently. “You really want to hear them?”

“I do,” Regina says.

“Okay,” Brianna clears her throat. “One: I won a spelling contest in primary school; two, my favorite animal’s a raccoon; and three, I’ve never gotten stoned.”

Regina hums. “Well, I’ll have to guess the raccoon.”

Brianna scoffs. “Why?”

“The other two seem so…you.”

“They do, don’t they? The straight-laced stench will haunt me until I die,” Brianna mutters. “You’re correct. My favorite animal’s a badger.”

Regina laughs, then Brianna laughs.

“You’ve got a nice laugh,” Regina says. Even in the total darkness, Regina can feel her head still spinning a little, her limbs heavy and her mind veiled and tipsy.

“You’ve got a nice everything,” Brianna replies quietly.

Regina’s heart surges for a moment. Then they’re both comfortably quiet and sleepy; at some point, Brianna’s breath becomes slow and steady, and Regina sits and listens.


	5. vanishing point

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> awkward vibes, a reality check, and johanna being a good friend
> 
> (vanishing point - alexandra savior)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hiiii  
> sorry for taking so long to update. hope you like it tho. i started a queen blog on tumblr so follow me there @discodykey! i talk lots about how i think queen's a band of lesbians lol  
> \- soph
> 
> CW: some angst? it's just sorta..,,,not the happiest idk

_five - vanishing point_

_as if the earth’s reserved for you and i_  
_not a soul for miles on either side_

Brianna is having a strange dream of Regina in a wedding dress just before she wakes up, her neck agonizingly stiff and her legs tingling and numb. The bathroom is all grey and blue, everything sleepy and silent. The faucet that was dripping earlier has stopped. Through the little awning window above the bathtub, she can hear birds.

Brianna tries to pull her knees into her chest so she can lift her feet out of the bathtub, but she’s tucked too tightly against the porcelain with Regina pressing on her other side. Regina’s breathing soft and shallow, her lips barely parted. Her feet are hanging over the tub’s edge, sparkly pink trainers still laced up. Brianna smiles and then yawns.

An ache starts in her temple, or maybe it’s been there the whole time. She winces. And the events of the evening start ebbing and dripping back into her awareness like a leaky tap. _That stupid game. My stupid tantrum,_ she thinks, rubbing her eyes. _Me, acting like some child at an adult’s party. Maybe I’ll just stay in this tub forever._

The lingering dream _(nightmare?)_  of Regina in a wedding dress darts between images of her, dancing loosely at the party, sipping her gin, smiling at Brianna. _ _I have no reason to be upset about it__ , she thinks as she lets her eyes close again and tries to rub the pain out of her forehead. _Plenty of people get engaged in their early twenties. And what obligation does she have to me, anyway? None. I didn’t tell her about Tim, so why should I have expected her to tell me about…whoever he was?_

Something about the idea of Regina committed to somebody like that makes Brianna’s stomach twist. She can’t put her finger on it. Perhaps it’s that Brianna’s built up an image of Regina being so free, not devoted to anything but her own dreams and passions. Perhaps it’s that they never talk much about their pasts anyway, mostly about the future, or the present, and it’s strange to think of Regina as having had a regular, domestic life at one point. Or perhaps, she is more enamored with the girl next to her than she thought.

Maybe it’s better that they leave the past undiscovered, Brianna wonders as she continues rubbing the slow circles on her temples.

After minutes of nebulous, foggy thoughts, Brianna can feel herself falling back asleep, so she forces her eyes open and groans.

“Regina,” she says. Her voice cracks.

The girl stirs against her, and then she lifts a hand to cover her face. “Ouch…I didn’t even drink that much, why’s it hurt so bad?”

Brianna chuckles. “Sleeping in the bathtub certainly didn’t help,” she says.

Regina lowers her hand and opens her eyes a crack, then jerks a little and lifts her head from Brianna’s shoulder. “’M sorry. Hope I didn’t make a muck of your shoulder there.”

“No, you didn’t. But let’s leave, quickly and quietly, yes?” Brianna mumbles, rolling her neck.

Regina stands up with some difficultly, pushing the shower wall for support as she steadies her feet on the tile floor. Then Brianna twists around longways so her feet are towards the tub’s grimy tap, and straightens out her knees. Her feet immediately go tingly.

“Oh, damn it,” Brianna says. “I shouldn’t have stayed crumpled up in here so long. My legs and feet are useless.”

“Let me help,” Regina reaches out her arms and Brianna remembers the first night they met, when she nearly passed out from exhaustion in the diner, and Regina helped her back to her flat. Brianna sighs and reaches for one of Regina’s hands.

The sensation starts coming back to her legs and feet when they get to the hallway, and back out into the lounge, with Regina wrapping one arm around Brianna’s waist. The lounge’s windows are west-facing, so the predawn light here is even less than in the bathroom. Through the imperfect obscurity, Brianna can make out a slowly-moving figure on the sofa. As her vision adjusts, the figure reveals itself to be Johanna and Melina intertwined and fast asleep, breathing in time with one another like one peaceful, hibernating beast. Johanna’s tucked tightly between the crease of the couch, and Melina’s side, and her head is resting just under Melina’s chin.

“They’re so sweet,” Regina whispers as she walks Brianna towards the front door of the flat.

They drive back to Brianna’s bedsit in a tense, strange silence. Questions pull on Brianna’s tongue, beg her to speak. Every time she opens her mouth to say something she finds herself coming up empty, like the burning questions go cold the second they’re offered precedence.

Brianna looks over at Regina. She’s got one hand on the steering wheel, her rings reflecting dim light, the other arm bent at the elbow, and her head rests against her palm. She’s squinting out at the road like it’s bright as noon, though the sun isn’t even really up yet.

“Are you okay?” Regina asks suddenly, flicking her glance to Brianna. Brianna blinks.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she says.

Regina sighs. Neither of them say anything for a moment.

“Well, are you going to go first or shall I?” Regina says shortly, like she’s joking, but her tone is terse, more serious. Brianna tenses up.

“I’m okay,” Brianna readjusts herself in her seat. “Are you?” She finishes, uncertainly.

Regina doesn’t say anything at first. Brianna looks at her again.

“Reg?” She says.

Regina frowns, rubs her forehead. “I don’t know.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

Brianna swallows and waits. It looks like it will be a rare sunny autumn day out, she notices as she looks out at the slowly lightening sky. She tries to think of some nice things they could do with the day ahead, but her mind is a knotted up ball of threads and she’s pulling on ends that only tighten the knots further.

“Did I do something?” The questions falls out of Brianna’s mouth like spilling water.

“No,” Regina says, so quickly she almost cuts her question short. Brianna waits for her to follow this up. She doesn’t, but Regina seems deep in some troubling thought, so Brianna tries to focus on the outside, on the blue sky, on the feeling of the passenger’s side window against her head, on anything but the suffocating misunderstanding.

“I’ve just…” Regina says as she turns onto Brianna’s street. Brianna looks at her expectantly. “I…suppose I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

Regina pulls the van up to the curb and shuts it off, but makes no move to get out.

“What’s on your mind?” Brianna asks softly.

“Can I be honest with you, Brianna?” Regina looks at her.

“Yes, of course,” she frowns at her. “You can tell me anything, what is it?”

“I suppose…well, seeing Melina and Johanna back at the flat, all cuddly and asleep on the sofa,” Regina begins. She looks down at her hands in her lap. “It reminded me of…well, it...” she sighs. “It reminded me of us, a bit. Just how we were, like that, sort of. Us together, asleep in the bathtub. Cuddled up like that.”

She doesn’t seem finished with her thought, so Brianna says nothing, though she feels her heart start contracting wildly like it’s forgotten how to properly pump blood.

“It reminded me of us, and that’s….that’s the problem,” Regina says. “That I have this ‘us’ concept in my mind. Because I can’t be a part of an ‘us’, not with anyone.”

Brianna doesn’t say anything. Regina keeps going.

“That…that sounds cruel, but listen. I just mean to say…I never meant for this to be anything more than a short-lived thing. A passing friendship on my way across the country, you know. I didn’t ever think I’d…that I’d…”

Brianna isn’t sure what to say or feel, but her head is spinning worse than any amount of wine could cause it to.

“B-Because that’s what I do,” Regina looks at Brianna’s blank expression and stumbles over her words. “That’s what I do, always, ever since I called off my engagement. I travel and have these fleeting affairs that are wonderful and fun because they don’t last forever. Don’t even last a week, usually. And I should have just left town before…before it got this far, but I didn’t, and I’m…I’m _really_ sorry that I…that I lead you into something I didn’t mean for this to become.”

“What do you mean?” Brianna hears her own voice float from her throat like a phantom.

Regina looks at her helplessly. “I mean that I absolutely love being with you, and talking to you, but I can’t do _this_ forever.”

“I didn’t ask you to do anything,” Brianna says.

“But we’ve just been going along not talking about anything important! We’ve clearly missed some quite significant details about one another! I mean, who the hell is _Tim?_ D’you see what I mean? We don’t even _know_ each other, really. We’ve been floating along in this little dream world where we just…I don’t know, __l_ ive in the moment _,__  or something, and we don’t think about the future, but the real world keeps going without us, and I…we have to get back to it,” Regina’s voice is going high-pitched and hysterical. “You have a life and things you need to do and I have a job I’m supposed to be travelling for.”

Brianna feels very heavy, like a rock had been dropped to the bottom of her stomach. She doesn’t think she could move from the passenger’s seat if she tried.

“You’re right,” she says, staring out the windshield at the bleak, watery sunlight starting to cast rays on the pavement.

She hears Regina sniff.

“It was silly of me to-” Brianna begins.

“Don’t,” Regina shakes her head. “You’re going to try to make me feel bad. Don’t do it. Don’t guilt me. You know that I’m right. And you know it isn’t your fault. It’s me. I should have left sooner. I shouldn’t have stayed the first night.”

“Yeah, you shouldn’t have,” Brianna snaps, feeling her traitorous eyes begin to sting.

The car fills with one of the most uncomfortable silences Brianna has survived. She’s biting her lower lip and holding a hard stare out the window, turned firmly away from Regina so as not to let her see the tears pooling against her lower lash line.

It always hurts so _fucking_ badly to hold in a cry, Brianna remarks inwardly as her throat aches and her chest screams for release. She needs to breathe but if she breathes she will break into a pitiful weep, and despite feeling very close to Regina just hours earlier, she feels an expansive distance between them at the moment, like she’s in a car with a stranger.

Her body betrays her. One lurching sob escapes her, and then she breathes sharply, then she whimpers again, and soon she’s crying against the passenger’s window.

 

When Brianna finished crying, they went up to the bedsit so Regina could collect her things. It was a relatively silent affair; not hostile, but irrevocably woeful and teetering on weepy at any given moment. Brianna say on the edge of her bed and stared at her feet while Regina stuffed clothes in her carpet bag, snatched up film canisters off the kitchen counter. When Regina is ready to leave, it’s almost noon.

She scrawls the address of the _Oculi_ office and her California landline on a piece of notebook paper.

“I’ll, um…I’ll be back in California…in three months or so, if all goes well. So…I’d love to hear from you again, if…if you want,” Regina says quietly from the door. Brianna doesn’t look at her. “And, you know, I’ve got your number, so…I can c-call from wherever I end up next, maybe we can…” Her voice tapers off.

Brianna hears the front door open, squeak, and then shut softly.

She’s crying again, falling backwards into her unmade bed, in a sort of agony she knows is eased only by the passing of time. It’s the horrid sort of heartbreak that refuses to be the fault of an individual, and is instead just a flaw in the circumstances: a miserable consequence of caring for someone whose life cannot line up with yours in the way a movie would have you think it can.

 -

“Bri, you look dreadful,” Johanna says when Brianna walks into work that evening. The shop is fairly calm when she gets there; a few odds and ends keep to themselves on cushy chairs or tables.

“I feel dreadful,” Brianna replies flatly.

“What happened?” Johanna asks as Brianna walks around the counter. Johanna’s crocheting next to the cash register.

“Regina left,” Brianna says as she pulls her hair back. She sees Johanna’s quick-moving fingers go still.

“She left?”

“Yes.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did she leave?”

“She’s a travelling photographer. It’s her job.”

Johanna opens her mouth to say something but closes it again. Brianna chews inside her cheek and stands by the espresso machine.

A party of four customers comes in just then and by the looks of them Brianna thinks they’re about to order something obnoxious. They do. As Johanna punches in the orders Brianna gets to work measuring out shots of espresso and steaming milk and putting however much syrup in wherever and whatever else. She feels so dead on her feet she nearly spills hot milk all over her hand.

“Jesus, be careful, Bri,” Johanna says as the four customers shuffle away to wait for their orders to be called. She steps forwards and takes the steel milk pitcher from Brianna’s hand and sets it down. “I’ll do these. Sit down.”

Johanna finished off the drinks and Brianna slumps into the stool by the cash register.

“I’m sorry, Jo,” she says.

“It’s fine, Bri, I know how to make them.”

“I’m sorry about everything,” Brianna feels her throat get tight again. “I’ve been ignoring you and Melina and slacking off at work and you were both right, I was losing my grip on my real life. And this is all my fault. I wouldn’t be so…so _fucking_ distraught if I h-hadn’t let it go this far.” She sniffles.

Johanna sets out one of the drinks and calls it out, then starts the next one. “I mean, you didn’t go too off your trolley. ‘S not like you married her or something. You just got a little caught up in the excitement of someone new, that’s all. It’ll be okay. You’ll be okay, lovie.”

Brianna looks up and sees Johanna looking at her with a gentle but steady gaze. Johanna hardly ever pulls out terms of endearment, so Brianna nods, even though she doesn’t believe her.

Johanna finishes up the orders and then walks over to stand by Brianna, leaning with her back to the register against the counter. “You seem really bent out of shape about it. Me and Mel are here for you.”

“I think I might love her,” Brianna is saying it before she even finishes thinking it, and when the phrase has left her lips, she wants to collapse under its weight.

“You might love her?”

“Yes.”

 _“Love,_ love?”

Brianna laughs shortly and hollowly, her shoulders bouncing once. “Some sort of love. Don’t know which kind.”

They don’t talk about it again. The night passes without much more commotion. When she gets home from work in the wee hours of the morning, her tiny bedsit feels massive, and empty, like a crater.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> helloo!  
> i would rlly appreciate some comments or feedback if yall have the time. would b rlly sweet. thank u for reading xx  
> \- soph


	6. in my head

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> questionable behaviors, past loves, and a payphone
> 
> (in my head - fickle friends)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi!  
> i got so much support on my last chapter!! that was so sweet. i really really really appreciate the comments and i'm sooo happy you all are liking the story so far.  
> \- soph
> 
> CW: drug and alcohol use, angst

_six - in my head_

_i've fallen in deep, who'd have known?_  
_always afraid of what will follow_  
_i've done things that i'd like to forget_  
_guess i deserve to get what i get_

Regina’s first night gone passed slowly and drunkenly. After leaving Brianna’s place, she drove until she was tired, then splurged on a shabby motel room, and bought a bottle of vodka from a liquor shop. She turned on the television, then sprawled on the bed, and nursed the bottle nearly dry. The evening was one lonely, hellish, spinning nightmare like a rollercoaster she couldn’t get off of. The alcohol made her feel worse, but she kept drinking it anyway, pounding it back like water. She was so ill the next day that the smell of the vodka spilled on her jumper made her vomit.

The second night after her departure was the saddest, most tearful one. She was still hungover when night fell, so she stayed away from the drink, and parked her van on an abandoned lakeside campground, deserted for the season. In the back of the van, she burrowed herself in her blankets and whatever dirty clothes or bags were piled up, and cried.

The third day and night, she tired to take pictures at the lake. She hated all of them. They were all grey and boring, even the ones where she tried interesting angles or aperture settings. She ended the evening with gin, and the van’s stereo roaring.

The fourth day and night, she thought about calling Brianna, but she felt such an immense and growing guilt she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

The fifth night, she drove her van down an open road lining a salt marsh, and pulled over to take some pictures. She tried using things in her van as props, but she felt like her creative energy was utterly dried, and everything seemed silly and futile. So she sat in the back of her van and tried writing out her feelings. Nothing came out.

The sixth night, she stopped in a small-ish town, and finagled a bloke at a pub into selling her pot when she smelled it on him. She smoked it alone in her van and thought of Brianna telling her she’d never gotten stoned. _I want to get stoned with Brianna_ , she thought, _I wanna be the first person she gets high with. How honored I’d be_. She cried again after that.

 

It’s the seventh night. She hears the flick of a lighter, then smells smoke. Regina opens her eyes. She hadn’t even realised she’d fallen asleep. A pipe is being passed between a circle of six people sitting cross-legged on the floor. She blinks a few times, then sits up. She’s on a leather sofa, using her carpet bag as a pillow. Lifting a hand absently, she can feel the cross-stitch pattern it’s left on her cheek.

On the other side of the room, four people are leaning over a kitchen island. One of them, a man, his face washed yellow by the hanging light fixture, is pulling something out of his breast pocket. The woman next to him is rolling up a post-it note into a little straw. Regina groans.

No one seems to notice she’s there. It takes her a few minutes of recollection to remember how she got here. The man, who’s now emptying a small white baggie onto the kitchen counter -- she met him at a bar earlier that night. _What time is it?_ Regina wonders, looking out the large windows opposite the leather couch. It’s pitch dark. The man was nice, she recalls. Or maybe he was just somebody with drugs, who seemed rather nonthreatening and generous with his stash when it came to seductive women. __‘_ Why don’t you come party with us, blondie?’_ he’d said, tucked into a booth and clad on either side by women with drowsy eyes and wasted smiles. The gaudy, lavish penthouse is occupied almost entirely by young women in fact, and a few men, who Regina doesn’t remember meeting.

She can tell from the sickly ache in her stomach and the fuzziness of her head that she’s on the tail end of a comedown, and she’s grateful she must have slept through the brunt of it.

Then the aching and discomfort all gets worse. _Brianna_ , she thinks. The name’s been banging around in her mind like an unforgiving, bulky parasite. It leaves bruises inside her skull, wears her out, exhausts her with guilt and grief. The one week she’s been gone has been the longest week of her entire life. She’s tried to speed it up, whether it be by sleep or by substances, but the hours just crawl by, in no hurry to ease her suffering. Every cognizant moment hurts. She looks again at the people at the kitchen island. One woman is bending down and putting one end of the rolled post-it to her nostril.

As much as Regina would like to erase her manic remorse, she wants more than anything in that moment to be alone. So she stands up, tucks her bag under her arm, claps a hand to her forehead to soothe the dawning headache, and sees herself out of the flat quietly.

As she rides the elevator down to the first floor, she remembers with an angry pang that her van is still in a car park near the pub. She hopes it isn’t too late to catch the tube there, because the second she steps outside, she’s hit with a merciless cold.

She has a scarf in her bag, but she doesn’t pull it out. Behind her, down the street, there’s a screeching laugh. _It can’t be too late,_ she thinks. _If there’s still drunk kids at the clubs and whatnot._

It’s taking more effort than it should for her to think of how to get to a tube station. She wants to amble through the streets and let the cold make a home out of her body; she wants to hurt and feel so much pain that she’s absolved of her guilt. She wants to ruminate on all the stinging thoughts of Brianna and just drag her feet along the pavements aimlessly until she drops dead.

She hasn’t been this miserable since her engagement. She was engaged to a man she met in California. She remembers how easily charmed she was back then, how naive, how easily swayed by anyone who gave her attention.

It had been a mild summer night in someone’s condo in west San Francisco when he first approached her. Regina couldn’t remember whose place it was, but it was a liminal sort of living space for a few different artists Regina knew. There was a painter, who was often asleep a mattress in the lounge; there was a poet who seemed to occupy the condo on the weekends; and a couple of others. That night in particular, there was a gathering of sorts at the condo. Not a party, but a get-together of fairly low-brow artists and riffraff. The painter, Steve, had invited Regina when they met outside a gallery neither of them had been able to get into.

She stood by a window looking towards the ocean, but the view was mostly chopped apart by T.V. antennas and uneven rooftops. Behind her, people spoke in hushed tones over a gentle melody coming from a record player in the corner. She could pick out bits and pieces of their conversations; they all waxed romantic about their mediums and muses, and Regina wanted to join, but she was still new at creative photography she didn’t feel like she fit in with these sort yet.

She was tapping her fingernails against her glass, a drink someone had made her which they called a _‘Cranberry Pandemic’,_ when he arrived by her side at the window.

“I go to these things all the time and I haven’t seen you before,” he said. Regina jumped and swiveled to look at him. He was just a little taller than she, with long, brownish hair, straight as pins that just passed his jaw. It looked unwashed, stringy. But he had kind eyes, and a diamond-shaped, freckled face.

“I haven’t been here before,” Regina said softly, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“What was that?” He’d leaned closer to her, an attempt at a playful smirk on his lips.

She cleared her throat. “I haven’t been to one of these party things before,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows, nodded, and leaned again into his upright stance. “And I take it you aren’t from here?”

She stared at him for a moment, then made a small noise of understanding. “Oh, yes. I’m from Cornwall, in England.”

“ _Corn_ wall,” he repeated. “Interesting. And what brought you to California?”

“Who are you?” Regina couldn’t help but smile incredulously at his hubris, the unwittingly patronizing affect to his voice she had learned to expect from men.

Regina doesn’t like to remember his name nowadays. But he presented it boldly, and held out his hand.

“And you are?” he said.

“Regina.”

“And so,” he said then. “Now that we’re no longer strangers, what brought you to California?”

She chanced a sip of the _Cranberry Pandemic_  and instantly regretted it, but she forced it down and kept her gaze out the window. “The same things that bring everyone to California. Improbable dreams. Sunshine.”

“What are your improbable dreams?”

She glanced at him with a suspicious smile, feeling as though he was teasing her. But when he said nothing more, she said, “I take pictures.”

“Ah, a photographer.”

Regina had never called herself a photographer before. “Yes, a photographer. I’m doing contributor work for a _Times_ in Sacramento right now, but…”

“You’d like to be doing your own work?” Regina was acutely aware that he was staring at her.

“I originally came here to start my career in photography, which I did technically. But not in the way I wanted. _Improbable_ dreams, you know,” she said. “I’d love to take pictures and travel.”

“Can I see some of your photographs sometime?” He asked then, stepping a little closer.

“Oh,” Regina jolted, and opened the messenger bag slung across her with her free hand. “I actually have a stack with me. It’s…they’re part of a little collection I was hoping to arrange as a sort of…like, an essay, perhaps.”

She pulled a thick envelope out and then crouched down briefly to set her drink on the wooden floor.

She opened the envelope and handed him the stack of photographs she’d had developed earlier that day. “Hold them by the edges,” she said.

He glanced over each one languidly, saying nothing for the first five photos. They were all taken inside various cafes and shops that Regina frequented; just aesthetically pleasing shots of book stacks, newspapers, indoor plants, coffee cups, sugar packets. Nothing profound, she knew that.

“You have a superb eye for design,” he said, looking over the sixth photo, which was of a dirty spoon on an open newspaper. “The proportions, perspective…”

Regina hadn’t expected much of anything in the way of commentary from him, let alone praise. “Oh…well, thank you very much.”

“And you organize color well in these shots. Even in the ones ones you didn’t stage. So and eye for color on you, as well,” he said. Then he looked at her and cocked an eyebrow. “Impressive.”

She was so flattered she felt hot. When she stashed the photos away again and picked her drink up off the floor, she cleared her throat and said, “So what sort of art do you do?”

“A bit of everything. I dabble in photography but mainly I’m a sculptor. And I did a mural, once. Have you seen the one of the dog in Bernal Heights?”

She hadn’t. He explained its location in great detail, and then talked about sculpting again, and about how he became a sculptor, and where he went to school, and everything else. At the end of the night, he gave her his number on a corner of a napkin, and offered to give her some photography pointers in the future.

“Maybe we can take pictures together sometime,” he said as he handed the napkin to her. “I’d love to hear more about your work. See more of your vision.”

When Regina got back to her apartment that night, she felt strangely taller, prettier, cooler. _You have a superb eye for design_ , he’d said. Her chest fluttered and she smiled unconsciously as she got ready for bed. It was the first substantial compliment she’d gotten on her work.

 _Impressive_ , he’d called her. No one had ever called her that.

-

 There’s a phone box by a corner store at the end of the street. Without thinking much at all, Regina roams in its direction, pulling her bag off her shoulder and digging through it for her yellow writing pad, where she has Brianna’s phone number scribbled in a margin.

 _Please be awake _,__ Regina thinks. _Please be awake and please don’t hang up. Don’t hate me. Don’t hate me._

Someone picks up on the fifth ring.

There’s giggling, then a deep breath. “Hush, hush, darling…hello, you’ve reached the May residence. This is M-Melina speaking.” Regina hears laughter in the background and her stomach flips cheerlessly.

“Hi, can I please talk to Brianna?” Regina’s voice comes out higher; softer than she feels. The unforgiving chill is making her legs cramp up. She jumps up and down a little in place as she holds the receiver between her ear and shoulder.

“Who’s this?” Melina says with a chuckle. They’re drunk. Regina closes her eyes and sighs. Melina speaks again. “…Johanna _, get off,_  I’ll be back in a mo, I’m on the phone, dear…yeah, hello? Who is this?”

“It’s…Regina,” she says, squeezing her eyes shut. The cold makes her head hurt worse.

It goes quiet on the other line. Then there’s some shuffling, and a clacking noise like the receiver’s been set down.  

Then, after forever:

“Regina?” Brianna’s voice comes softly.

“Brianna,” Regina says. She tries to come up with other words to say and nothing comes out.

It’s silent but for the fuzz of the phone speaker.

“What do you need, Reg?” Brianna says. Her emotion is undetectable.

“I.…” Regina wasn’t even sure she would get this far and now she doesn’t know what exactly to say. “I just wanted to tell you I miss you and I’m sorry,” she manages. She hates the way it sounds, so fake and unspecific.

“Yeah,” Brianna mutters.

“And I…I feel really, really awful for hurting you. It wasn’t right of me to just walk out on you like that. You didn’t deserve it.” Regina’s eyes are closed and she’s leaning against the glass pane of the booth, not caring that it’s dirty, just focusing her hardest on making the words come out right. “I wish I could make it up to you.”

Brianna huffs into the receiver but says nothing.

“And it’s just…I think I was scared,” Regina continues unguided, unsure what she’ll say, or what she means. “Because I fancy you quite a lot. It’s just been…a long time since I’ve felt like that. So I suppose I just…ran away. It was stupid.”

There’s a short silence. “Your farewell could have been more elegantly executed, yes,” Brianna says.

Regina almost smiles. “Look, um…” she quivers against the cold air. “I’m using a public phone and my time’ll run out quick, so, if I ring you tomorrow at three, can we talk? Properly?”

Silence again. Some shuffling, muffled, hushed voices. “Tomorrow at three?” Brianna says.

“Yes. Is that alright?”

“I’ll be waiting anxiously for your call,” Brianna says; Regina can’t tell if it’s bitterly or amicably. The lines goes dead.

-

She eventually, after some late-night tube ordeals, tracks down her van, and parks it beneath an overbridge in an industrial corner of the city, near train tracks and wet land. Tomorrow she will figure out how to call Brianna, but for now, she is freezing and exhausted, wearing three jumpers to shield herself from the cold that her van can’t keep out. It’s pitch black under the overbridge, and quite loud.

Regina almost never succumbs to self-pitiful thoughts of how alone she is in the world, because she knows this is more or less up to her. But sometimes on dark, frigid nights, she falls asleep feeling as small and insignificant as dust.

 


	7. smoke signals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a harrowing night, a phone call, and an eager return  
> (smoke signals - phoebe bridgers)
> 
> PLEASE look over the warnings in my chapter notes before reading!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello sweets!  
> you all are wonderful and generous with your comments. i adore you all. i hope you're liking where this story is going. this chapter is...sort of rough lmao sorry  
> \- soph  
> p.s. i don't have anything against tim staffel at all, i just wanted to use him as an ex-boyfriend in the story lol ok srry carry on
> 
> CW: severe injuries and physical trauma

_seven - smoke signals_

_the future's unwritten_   
_the past is a corridor_

While she waits at 2:53 for Regina to call, Brianna lays on the ground next to the phone and stares at the slightly reddened blemish on her right pointer finger. The little burn wasn’t severe at all, but it had hurt, and the mark would probably take a while to fade entirely.

Johanna had insisted at work that morning that she couldn’t see the scar at all, and that she was overreacting.

“You don’t get it,” Brianna had muttered, then walked away to finish the dishes in the back.

A few minutes later, as she was bent over the sink, she felt something touch her back. She turned around to see Johanna, staring with wide, sparkling eyes.

Then she was hugging her, the force nearly tipping Brianna backwards into the sink. “I forgot, Brianna. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Jo, you didn’t mean to forget.”

Brianna held her like that for a minute, then wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper, and ushered her back out into the cafe. Johanna was a bit softer, more gentle for the rest of her shift.

 

Now It’s 2:56 and Brianna lowers her hand, tucking the finger into a fist. She lays flat on her back, stares at the shapes on the stucco ceiling. She too wishes she could forget sometimes. At times, she almost does -- the wide, uneven scar under her clothes is almost two years old. _Two years ago, in a month _,__  she thinks.

It happened on Halloween. It was her five-month anniversary with Tim. Him, Brianna, Melina, Johanna, Kashmira, and three of their other friends went out to a campground by the ocean. Melina planned the excursion. “A ghostly celebration, out in the wilderness,” she’d mused as they piled into separate cars; Kash, Mel, Jo, and Kash’s friend Gia in one car, and Tim, Bri, plus Tim’s coworkers Robert and Lewis in Tim’s car.

Brianna always felt a little surge of pride in her chest when she slid into the passenger’s seat beside Tim, as whoever was with them got in the back. It was like she was being flaunted, shown off, and she took advantage of it, sometimes unconsciously -- when they’d been about on the road about twenty minutes, she ran her long fingers through the ends of her curly hair, twisting the coils around her fingertips and letting them bounce back to place. Then she brushed her hand slowly up and down the leather armrest, close enough to be in Tim’s peripheral vision when he looked at the gear shift. When he shot her a knowing, randy look, she raised an eyebrow and rested both her hands in her lap.

“You little…” Tim began, smirking. Then he shook his head and looked forward to the road again.

Tim was her first serious boyfriend. Before Tim, Brianna was a gallivanting tease, a _charmer_ , as Tim called her later, _a deceptively shy little thing with some real tricks up her sleeve_. She was never as flagrantly cheeky as Melina, or as bold as Johanna, and she tended to stay away from the substances they liked to indulge in -- but she was happy to put her feminine charms to good use, and not think too much about it.

And Tim always seemed to enjoy the little antics she put on to make him a bit jealous in public. So she didn’t stop, even when they decided to date seriously. She still sent amorous glances to other blokes on the tube, or in the pub, or wherever they were, just to feel Tim wrap his arm around her and pull her flush against him, mumble something in her ear. He responded to all her tantalizing and baiting in equal measure. Johanna and Melina thought it was so funny, the way Brianna could be such a tease without saying anything at all, but then flush scarlet at the mention of anything lewd or racy.

The sky was deep blue and grey with rolling fog at the horizon when they arrived at the campsite. Melina and her bunch were there first, already pulling things from the boot of the car and carrying them from the muddy lot and into a clearing beyond the trees.

“What took you so long, Tim?” Johanna called when Tim shut off his car and stepped out. “We’ve practically done all the hard work without you lot.”

“Must’ve been distracted,” Tim said, looking back at Brianna with a wink. She went warm and unbuckled her seat belt.

Once they’d set up the camping chairs around the fire pit, Tim and Melina started up the fire, and soon enough everyone was pulling bits of wadded up tissue and old receipts out of their pockets to toss into the flame. Brianna pulled the sleeves of her jumper down as she watched a ticket from the cinema curl into a black feathery thing among the orange glow.

Melina’s first order of business was spooky stories, but _Johanna’s_  first order of business, alcohol, took precedence. She lugged the blue ice chest over and passed around beers.

As they worked through their first and second beers, Melina and Johanna put on quite the Halloween spectacle. While Melina went to grab blankets from the car, Johanna began a story called “Tombstone Terror”, which Brianna used as an excuse to leave her chair and slide herself onto Tim’s lap. The story ended with Melina screaming _“BOO!”_ and popping up between Johanna and Kashmira, wearing a banshee mask and wearing several blankets as bulky shawls. Johanna cackled with laughter but Kashmira nearly cried, and had to be coaxed back into the festive spirit by Gia.

Looking back, Brianna knows she had no reason to expect the night would go anything other than swimmingly.

Maybe she should have seen it coming, she tells herself sometimes, when she decided to let her eyes linger too long on Lewis, sitting across the fire from her and Tim. She was still in Tim’s lap, as much as she could be with her gangling limbs. She was in the process of finishing her third beer, and her head was just comfortable and warm enough for her to let herself go a little. Tim was engaged loosely in conversation with Gia, and everyone else seemed to be settling into the swing of their own chatter. With her head leaned back on Tim’s shoulder, and her legs slung over his thighs, Brianna smiled a small, tipsy smile at Lewis and Robert.

But she didn’t feel the familiar squeeze of Tim’s hand on her hip, didn’t feel him grip her closer, or feel his lips graze her jaw.

She took her bottle by the neck and tipped back the last of her drink, keeping her eyes glued to Lewis and Robert, and made sure to lick her lips as she brought the bottle down again. The boys were chatting amicably, but Brianna knew she had their attention by the way their heads darted her way slightly, almost against their wills.

And still nothing from Tim.

“...I mean, he’s got good technique but he’s a bit of a rip off, you should hear…” He rattled off about music to Gia. Brianna shifted against him and huffed.

“Brianna,” Lewis said suddenly, looking at her over the fire’s slowly-dying light. “Come chat with us, yeah? Think Tim’s busy.”

Robert sniggered. Though Brianna knew they were probably poking fun at her obvious annoyance towards Tim, she was miffed enough to take them up on it. She lifted herself off Tim’s lap, and stepped around the campfire to sit in an empty chair beside Lewis.

“Hello, lads,” she said, with a friendly tilt of the head.

“What’s Tim talking to Gia about there?” Robert asked with a sly smile.

“Dunno, must be something __very__ important,” Brianna shrugged and put a hand to her thick curls, bouncing them side-to-side slightly. “Think he’s forgotten about me?” She grinned.

“It’d be a shame,” Robert said slowly.

Then there was a hand on her shoulder and she was pulled to her feet.

“What are you doing?” Tim said in a low voice, face in shadow, body blocking the fire from Brianna’s view. It was suddenly much darker than she’d remembered without its steadying blaze.

“I was just talking to Lewis and Robert,” Brianna said, shoving Tim’s hand off her shoulder. “You seemed busy.”

He grabbed her again, by her upper arm. And it felt different, not reassuring or even lustful, but like he was pulling on the arm of a disobedient child. She yanked her arm away again.

“Come with me,” Tim muttered, reaching for her again. She couldn’t see his eyes; he was still lit from behind by dimming firelight, and without their familiarity, she wasn’t sure who she was looking at.

Then he pulled her with both hands, not too forcefully, but her legs were shaking, and she came into his grasp quicker and easier than either of them were ready for. He turned them around on the spot, swiftly, and Brianna’s unsteady foot came down on a rock on the edge of the fire pit.

She heard Melina gasp, then Johanna screamed, then Brianna herself was screaming. Then other people were yelling and screaming too. She didn’t know it was happening until it was happening.

Nothing but anguish existed, nothing was real but pain. __I’m going to die.__ And it was deep, eternal, penetrating, twisting, gnarling, blaring, tormenting -- she couldn’t think anything except _I’m going to die_ and the world just didn’t exist anymore; everything was torture, her body felt saturated by smoke. _I’m going to die._

At some point, the blinding agony stopped, and she blacked out. But through the violent pain that, until that moment, seemed unending, Brianna’s brain was one loop, one horrible, shrill, discordant note that rang in her skull: _I’m going to die. I’m dying_.

 

She got skin grafts for the burns on her right hip, side, part of the arm, and a small part on her breast. The healthy skin was taken from her left thigh and hip, and so she had some minimal scarring there too -- but the scarring from the grafts was a long, sprawling landscape; multi-textural and discolored varieties of pink, red, white, and beige.

She does not hate the scar. She feels no fondness towards it usually, but not apathy, either; rather, she regards it like a mandatory companion, a partner. On days when she can’t do anything when lie down and remember the night it happened, the scar feels like a steadying hand on her shoulder, or a gentle, composed stroke down her back. On days when she, like Johanna, almost forgets it’s there, it feels like a deadweight.

Part of Brianna wonders all the time what she would be like today, if it hadn’t happened. _Would I have carried on like that?_ she thinks. _Being that gormless, petty little flirt? Would I have ever learned?_

She pities her younger self sometimes. Pities her naivety and her unwitting cries for attention. Brianna wishes all the time she could go back and tell her the things she needed to hear.

 

It’s 3:01 when the phone rings.

“Hello?” Brianna says when she brings the receiver to her ear.

“Brianna?” Regina’s voice is forward, optimistic. “How are you?”

“I’m…” Brianna begins, closing her eyes. “I’m well, I suppose. How are you?”

There’s soft breathing, not much else. “I finally have a real idea for my photo essay, I think,” Regina says.

“What is it?” Brianna says, trying to rip her mind away from the smell of burning skin, the taste and sting of hot smoke. She hears Regina talking but doesn’t know what she’s saying. Brianna opens her eyes and sits up, shaking her head back and forth. _Snap out of it,_ she thinks. _I can’t let this ruin the day. Just put it away. Put it away._

She tries to envision herself taking the memory of that Halloween and balling it up into a tight, dense orb in her hands, and throwing it as far as she can into an undetermined, colorless void. Regina in still talking.

“...so, it would be like, creating a domestic wilderness. I think it could be really beautiful. What do you think?”

“It sounds great. Really cool, Reg,” Brianna rubs her forehead and twists around so she’s sitting with her back up against the wall, the window above her, and she tries to focus on the slight breeze coming in.

“Were you even listening?” Regina says. “I’m sorry, Brianna, I _am_. I’m sorry I left like that, I really want to-”

“I’m not mad at you,” Brianna cuts her off. “I’m just...I’m distracted. It’s not you.”

“Oh,” Regina says. “Something wrong?”

“No, nothing,” Brianna takes a deep breath. “Johanna’s here and she just upended an entire cup of tea on my sofa. That’s all.”

Regina laughs tentatively. Brianna puts a wide smile on her face and hopes it can be heard through the phone.

“But, um, yeah, I’m not angry at you, Regina. I just…I think, in spending time with you, I forgot it’s part of your job…for you to, um…travel around. It’s…it’s just complicated, I think,” Brianna says, picking at a loose thread on the knee of her trousers.

“I should have brought it up differently,” Regina’s voice is quiet. “We could have had a proper, painless conversation about it.”

Brianna realises, as she clutches the receiver, that she’s missed hearing Regina’s voice dearly. It’s quiet between them for a moment. “I just wish I hadn’t let myself get carried away,” Brianna mumbles.

“How do you mean?”

“You…I don’t know. You _hypnotized_ me, I suppose,” Brianna says with a wry laugh. “Made me forget about the real world when I was with you. So when you just, um…left, it…I don’t know, it hurt. It was like…” she laughs gloomily again. “Waking up from a really nice dream.”

Regina’s breaths begin with high, thin little noises, then fall to silence. She sniffles.

“Regina, are you crying?” Brianna says. “Please don’t cry, oh no…” She feel pressure build in her chest.

“No, no, ’m not,” Regina’s voice is thick. “Sorry.”

But Brianna hears Regina’s sharp intakes of breath, and her watery, choked exhales. Brianna lets her weep; doesn’t interrupt her, doesn’t question her.

Some time later, once the fuzz of the phone’s speaker is becoming a background din, and Brianna’s going back into the tunnels of her brain, Regina says,

“So, uh, for the photo essay,” she coughs and sniffles.

“Yes?” Brianna pipes up.

“I think…it might be useful to have a companion,” Regina clears her throat and her voice falls to its regulated pitch, no longer a sodden whine. “Someone to…take the journey with me.”

Brianna’s mind short-circuits, and then reels. “Yeah?”

“I-I know it’s ridiculous, absolutely barmy,” Regina says quickly. “You have a job, you’ve got friends, a whole life, I know I’m being foolish, but…”

Brianna tries to say something but nothing comes out, so Regina continues, “I’m hypnotized by you, too, is what I’m trying to say. And I’d love for you to come along with me.”

She hears herself say it. “Okay,” Brianna smiles automatically, feeling it spread across her face; a sudden warm flush.

“Yeah?” Regina says.

“I’ll figure it out,” Brianna says. “I’ll…I’ll take time off work, I don’t know. I’ll talk to my landlord, I’ll work it out. I want to come with you.”

Regina says she can be back at Brianna’s flat within the next day to help her get her affairs in order.  

They talk for another two hours or more, both of them upbeat, lighter. Regina tells Brianna about the collapsing inn she’s calling from, where she says the alarm clock on the bedside table is giving off a weird smell and noise, and the headboard of the twin bed has a strange, unsightly stain.

“Take some pictures so you can show me later,” Brianna says.

And Brianna tells her about Melina and Johanna’s plans to adopt a kitten from a local shelter, then she tells her the story of Melina spontaneously adopting her old cat Romeo on New Year’s Eve the year before.

There’s a few dips in the conversation, a few slow moments, where they’re quiet, but it’s comfortable and generous. A thick stripe of buttery light beams through the window, warming the back of Brianna’s curly head, and casting her elongated shadow on the wood floor. It’s returning slowly; the sweet, elusive vapor that hangs around Brianna’s head when she’s with Regina. When she closes her eyes and listens to her talk, her heartbeat slows down, and everything thrums, even the uncertainties, shortcomings and confusions.

When her flat starts getting dark, Brianna says softly, “I should get going.”

“Thank you for picking up the phone,” Regina says.

“Thank you for calling,” Brianna says through an exhale.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be here.”

Regina chuckles gently, and then there’s a wordless moment between them that begs to be filled with something.

_I think I might love her_ , Brianna remembers saying to Johanna the week previous.

“Well, bye then,” Regina says.

“Bye, Reg. I…I’m glad you’re coming back.”

“Me too.”

 -

“Darling, you’re ridiculous,” Melina says at work the next morning. “Johanna told me to tell you you’re ridiculous.”

“I am, you’re right,” Brianna’s smiling, fiddling with a bit of receipt paper and staring out the front door.

“How long will you be gone?”

“Dunno,” she shrugs and bends down to pick up the red bucket under the counter. She carries it out to the seating area, dipping her free hand into the sanitizer and grabbing the greyish cloth. She sets the bucket down on a table and wrings out the rag.

“Don’t walk away from me,” Melina says, following behind Brianna. Brianna starts wiping down a table by the window.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” Brianna says. “We might leave the country, we might stay. I really don’t know. It’s exciting.”

Melina gawks. “What about your lease?”

“Don’t have one. Just a rental agreement. I can terminate it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” Brianna douses the rag in the bucket again and moves on to another table. When Melina doesn’t say anything, Brianna turns to look at her, and finds her with her face in her hands.

“Melina?” she says.

“She left you, Regina, she l-left you behind and you were so upset, just a few days ago,” Melina wails, wiping her eyes with the heels of her palms. “A-and now you’re d-doing the same th-thing to me and Jo. Y-you’re just leaving.”

Brianna drops her rag and stretches out her arms to pull Melina towards her. “Oh, dear, Melina. It’s alright.”

“I d-don’t know what I’ll do without you,” her voice is soft. “Liam just h-hired all these new baristas and I don’t want to train them. Th-they don’t know what they’re d-doing. A-and I’ll have to do it a-anyway because Jo l-loses her temper with newbies and y-you’re leaving, a--”

“Have you and Johanna synced up your periods?” Brianna chuckles softly, patting the back of Melina’s head.

“I think so,” she murmurs. “Dear. She’s a mess, too, isn’t she?”

Melina laughs, and Brianna laughs along with her.

“I’m not going to leave without saying a proper goodbye,” Brianna says. “And I’m absolutely positively _certain_ I won’t be gone forever. I don’t think I’d survive if I thought I couldn’t see you girls again.”

Brianna goes back to cleaning tables, making her way in a loop along the shop’s perimeter as customers shuffle in and out for to-go orders as is typical during a morning shift. Kash comes in to say a quick hello to Melina on her way to class, and once Brianna’s done with tables and back behind the counter, the slew of costumers reaches its usual peak.

Once it slows down, Melina says,

“Bri, can I ask you something, lovie?”

Brianna’s washing her hands. “Yeah, you alright?”

“Do you love Regina?” Melina tilts her head to the side.

Brianna turns off the tap and shakes her hands, then dries them off on her jeans. “That’s a difficult question.”

“It’s a yes or no answer.”

Brianna considers this for a moment. “Well, I don’t know if I love her _yet_. But what is love, anyway? What do you mean, _do I love her?_ ”

Melina rolls her eyes, and shakes her head a little.

“I mean, I care about her,” Brianna says. “I feel a connection to her, and I feel this…strong pull towards her, if that makes sense,” she looks at Melina. “Like I just want to be around her as much as I can.”

Melina smiles a little.

“I want her to be happy and I want her in my life, because I feel happier when she’s there. It’s a bit like how I feel about…about you and Jo.” Then Brianna’s stomach does a turn. “I love you and Jo.”

Melina’s grinning.

“I love Regina,” Brianna says. “I do, you’re right. I love her.” She doesn’t know whether to smile or break down, so she stands there.

It’s like she’s becoming hyper-aware of something she wasn’t even aware of just a moment ago -- she can’t stop thinking it to herself now, over and over: _I love Regina. I love Regina._

It’s strange to be so sure of it, after almost two years of feeling no interest in romantic love. After Tim, Brianna’s desire for companionship dropped so quickly and dramatically she lost the ability to see herself as being anything other than totally alone. And that was fine, then. But now a dam has broken within her, and a strong loneliness she didn’t know was there is bursting forth with a torrential force.

The bell on the door tinkles. Then she is, like she said she would be.

Brianna’s heart spasms so wildly she almost doesn’t know what to do, but then she’s climbing, toppling over the counter, nearly kicking the cash register, and careening towards Regina on unsteady feet.

As the space between them gets shorter and shorter, the seconds get longer, and Brianna knows it’s going to happen. _I’m going to do it_. She barely has time to think it, and then her hands find Regina’s pink cheeks, cold from the chilly air outside, and she pulls her forward into her first kiss in two years.

Something drops onto the ground near Brianna’s foot -- _maybe Regina’s bag_ , she thinks fleetingly, her lips still flush against Regina’s. The kiss evolves out of a kiss and into a very tight, eager embrace, with Regina’s face pressed into Brianna’s shoulder, and Brianna sustaining a mouthful of blonde hair.

“You smell like your van,” Brianna mutters against the top of her head. She feels Regina laugh, feels it vibrate against her chest.

They stand like that, holding each other, until there’s a new rush of customers, and Brianna has to go back to work. Regina orders a coffee, pulls out her yellow writing pad, and sits in the corner.


	8. you never knew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a swing set, white lies, and height difference antics  
> (you never knew - haim)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi!  
> the support means so much, you guys, thank you. i'm glad you're liking it. but of a fluffier chapter for you. no warnings :)  
> \- soph

_eight - you never knew_

_i love to have you_

_right there by my side_

The afternoon is bleak, but mild sunlight welcomes them outside for a walk when Brianna gets off work. They step outside and neither of them can wipe the silly grins off their faces. Regina feels like she’s been smiling unceasingly since she stepped foot into the coffee shop that morning and saw Brianna and her _damned_ hair careening in her direction.

Instead of steering themselves towards Regina’s van, as had become their custom when Regina was staying with Brianna, they stand outside the shop, directionless for a moment. An autumn chill sends Regina bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet.

“Where to, sweets?” she looks up at Brianna.

“Let’s walk and see where we end up, yeah?” Brianna smiles and starts walking to the right.

They slide effortlessly back into their comfortably rhythm, and Regina is grateful for it, if not a little surprised. Brianna seems practically elated -- she walks in longer, springier strides that make her hair bounce. She walks close to Regina, too; so close Brianna’s knuckles brush the back of Regina’s hand.

She’s so pleased to be back with Brianna she can almost ignore the gnawing, lasting guilt in her gut. She waits for Brianna to bring it up -- she anticipates the jubilant, high feeling to fade the second the conversation turns serious. _Because it has to be serious this time_ , Regina thinks.

But Brianna doesn’t bring up the hard questions, at first. They walk side by side along the pavement, turning off onto residential roads and crossing through parks as the already-feeble sun thins.

She wants Brianna to kiss her again. She tries to push the thought away and focus on the reunion at hand, but she’s barely in the present moment as they traipse through an empty playground.

The conversation lulls for a minute. Brianna wraps her arm at the elbow around the pole of a swingset, and twirls herself around it with a flushed smile on her face. Regina stops walking to watch her.

“You didn’t tell me you were also a pole dancer,” Regina says.

“It never came up.” Brianna holds the pole with her hands and hangs backwards, and the fragile sunset behind her makes her look cool and pearlescent at the edges, or maybe it’s just Regina’s eyes.

Regina scoffs and wraps her jacket tighter around her. “I’d throw you a fiver if I had one on me.”

Brianna sighs then pulls herself upright again, and kicks at the woodchips. “D’you want to sit?” She asks. “My legs are hurting me. Been on my feet all day.”

“Oh, yeah,” Regina says. She walks past Brianna and plops herself down in one of the swings, holding her carpet back in a heap on her lap. “Christ. My feet barely touch the ground when I’m on this thing, see?” She kicks her boots back and forth a little. Brianna slumps into the swing to the right of Regina’s and her feet drag heavily against the woodchips.

“’Spose we even each other out, height-wise, hm?” Brianna smiles and sways forward and back slightly in the swing.

Regina can feel it coming surely as the night comes after sunset. A silence falls between them, and somehow Regina can feel that the next thing out of Brianna’s mouth will be an uncomfortable inquiry. She wishes they could just exist together, and not have to talk about the hard things. Wishes she could kiss Brianna properly and slowly, not hurried like in the coffee shop.

 _Did she mean anything by it, though?_  Regina thinks to herself, staring at her feet swaying above the ground, a slight wind blowing a strand of hair across her lips. _It could have been…a strange gut reaction? Perhaps she’s very platonically affectionate? Some women kiss their female friends, don’t they? How long has it been since I’ve had friends?_

“Will you tell me about your engagement?”

“I will if you’ll tell me about Tim,” Regina counters with a raised eyebrow. Brianna gives her a small smile.

“That silly game seems like it was so long ago,” Brianna says with a laugh. “Me, storming drunkenly out of Mel and Jo’s lounge. It was really just a week and a few days, wasn’t it?” She looks softly at Regina next to her.

“Felt like fuckin’ forever, somehow,” Regina chuckles.

“Somehow,” Brianna nods.

Another silence.

“So, tell me about it,” Brianna clears her throat.

“Right,” Regina shakes herself a little and lets her swing go back and forth. “Where to begin. I met him in California. At this…it was a little get-together of artistic types. And he just…really swept me off my feet, that charming fucker. He wasn’t even anything special, looking back, but alas. I was…” Regina rolls her eyes. “A right twit. Thought he was the best thing since spiced rum.”

Brianna wrinkles her nose and Regina laughs.

“But y’know, he liked my photographs. Or said he did. And he made me feel special, I ‘spose, so I’d do this bit where I played dumb, pretended not to know anything about photography so he’d explain it to me. Wish I could go back and slap myself.” Regina rubs the bridge of her nose and chuckles dryly. “But we carried on like that. My photographs started getting some attention, few months after I met him. He wasn’t getting the recognition he wanted for his sculpting, or anything else really. He was quite shit, to be honest. But he got all bent out of shape about me getting into galleries and whatnot when he wasn’t, and…” she stops, and sighs deeply, nearly yawning.

“Sounds like a prat,” Brianna kicks the ground.

“...He just became insufferable after awhile. Berating my work, putting me down. He proposed a week after we’d made up from one of our really big rows. Like I said, I was stupid, said yes, thought he’d shape up. He didn’t. And…well, to make a long story less long, I finally gathered my wits enough to leave him eventually, and…I left California shortly thereafter.” She finishes with a shrug.

It wasn’t a _lie_ , exactly, but Regina darted around the details she preferred to leave unsaid, like the night he smashed her camera against a wall, or the time he took a stack of Polaroids she’d spent the day taking and burnt black circles on them with cigarettes. She doesn’t feel the need right now to bother Brianna with the details of the multiple pregnancy scares, the drunk blunders, the scathing insults that never seem to remove themselves totally from Regina’s mind.

“I’m sorry it ended so badly, Reg,” Brianna says. Regina looks at her.

“’S alright,” she says. “Your turn. Tim, tell me about this bloke.”

The look that falls over Brianna’s face is hard to read precisely, and Regina realises just how dark it’s become with the sun fully down. “He was my boyfriend. We ended things…two years ago, about.” She looks forward at nothing. Regina watches her.

“And?”

“And what?”

Regina scoffs. “I gave you a whole story, Bri, give me _something_.” She nudges Brianna’s arm with her elbow. To her surprise, Brianna glares at her.

“Well, it’s not the easiest thing to talk about, Reg.”

“What, think the ex-fiance story is easy for me?” Regina says.

“I didn’t say that, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Brianna shakes her head and raises her voice. “It ended somewhat catastrophically, you could say.”

“Catastrophically?” Regina raises her eyebrows with a slight smile that Brianna didn’t return. Regina’s face fell.

“Yes. I sustained…eh, quite a grisly injury. And he just didn’t want to…be together anymore after that,” Brianna finishes her sentence with her brows knitted, and a little tilt to her head, like she was choosing her words carefully but hurriedly.

“An injury?” Regina repeats.

“Eh, yes. I got…um, it’s…” Brianna stops. She’s clutching the chains of the swing, staring at her knees.

“Come on, sweets, spit it out, I won’t bite your head off,” Regina pumps her legs a little, swinging herself enough to blow the hair back off her face. She waits, and Brianna doesn’t move.

Regina is completely unsure what to make of the girl’s still silence, so she lets herself swing to a gradual stop, looking out at the still-light edge of the horizon which is fading from a pale yellow to a bluish grey. __I_ t’ll be pitch black out before we know it, won’t it? _Regina thinks. Based on the way the conversation is going, Regina has a plummeting feeling in her gut the dark, cold walk back to Brianna’s bedsit will be uncomfortable at best.

“I broke my leg,” Brianna says. Regina turns her head rapidly to look at her. Her head is still down, but her hands have loosened their vice grip on the chains and rest in her lap now. “We were in this car crash with some of his mates. We were all fine. But…I had the cast, and couldn’t get around as much, couldn’t…eh, do the things we liked doing, as easily. So he just went and got himself another girl. By the time I got my cast off he was really in it with this new girl, so I just didn’t bother, eh, reaching out again. We hadn’t been together that long anyway.” She shrugs.

Regina nods silently and attentively but her brain is telling her to cut in and demand more answers for the things that don’t add up. “You…you said the injury was quite grisly?” Regina prompts after a few silent moments.

“Oh,” Brianna says. “I meant it as in, the accident itself, quite a horrid site. Tim’s car, completely totaled. But we were all…you know, unscathed in retrospect. Leg’s all healed.” She clears her throat and picks at the thigh of her jeans.

“I’m sorry it ended for such a…superficial reason,” Regina says slowly.

“Is what is it,” Brianna sighs and looks towards the dark eastern sky, the back of her curly head facing Regina. “We were barely out of our parent’s homes at that age anyways. Young, foolish, all that.”

“Is that to say you aren’t young and foolish now?” Regina says with a chuckle. “About to run off with an artist.”

She hears Brianna laugh shortly, but she doesn’t look at her, just keeps her gaze held out east, in direct aversion to Regina, and rocks slightly on the swing. She’s breathing slow, shallow, like she’s bobbing above the surface of a weepy puddle.

Regina doesn’t buy the broken leg story in its entirety, but she notices Brianna’s unwillingness to look in her direction, and the way her words seem fragile enough to wilt. She won’t push her any more tonight.

“Maybe we should get walking back now, yeah?” Regina says.

Brianna jolts, then hops off her swing and looks at her, her eyes shiny. Regina’s chest pangs but she doesn’t say anything. “Let’s get going, sure,” Brianna says. “Your van’s just back at the Northwest Moon, is it?”

 -

Brianna seems to start cheering up again once they get back to the bedsit, and she turns on a few lamps, filling the room with warm light. The walked to the van in a near-silence, like Regina’d expected, but Brianna insisted she was just tired and had lots on her mind. So Regina dissolved into her thoughts too, as they walked the dark sidestreets, her mind eventually settling on unpleasant thoughts of California and burnt Polaroid pictures.

“Have you eaten? Shall I make us some food?” Brianna says as she takes off her jacket.

“Let me do it,” Regina says. “You were fixing drinks for people at work all day. But I’m afraid I don’t remember my way perfectly ‘round your kitchen.”

“I won’t leave you to fend for yourself,” Brianna says. “I haven’t forgotten Two Truths and a Lie. The lie was that you could cook, was it not?” She grins, and Regina’s gaze dawdles over the way one of her canine teeth pokes against her lower lip.

“Practice makes perfect,” Regina says. She drops her bag by the door walks into the kitchen. “What should we eat?”

As she rummages through the refrigerator, she hears music begin, a slow-paced but steady rock tune with a catchy riff. She smiles to herself and she plucks some things from the fridge, shuts it, and turns around, to see Brianna walking away from the turntable by her bed and towards the kitchen. She sits herself on the kitchen bar counter across from the fridge and stove, crosses her legs at the ankle, and watches Regina.

“Why don’t you just put something quick together? Like some sandwiches and tea,” Brianna says.

“I’m not going to burn the bloody flat down if I try to cook, Bri,” Regina mumbles as she stands on the tips of her toes to reach a pan on a shelf. She stretches her arm up as far as her physicality allows, barely brushing the handle --

Then she feels warmth at her back, and she’s pressed gently against the counter. She sees Brianna’s svelte fingers clasp around the pan’s handle and pull it from the shelf. There’s soft breathing above her ear.

“There you go,” Brianna mutters behind her, putting the pan down on the stove. Regina turns around and is met with Brianna’s soft eyes, much closer to hers than she’d been ready for. Brianna wiggles her eyebrows a little. Regina gulps. “If you’re really determined to try your hand at a proper meal, you can. But I think we’re both a little sleepy. I’d be happy with a little sandwich and tea.”

Regina coughs and Brianna’s eyes suddenly feel intense, so she looks away. “Alright, put this back then,” Regina jabs her thumb at the pan on the stove.

Brianna does so, and Regina slips out from between her and the counter to grab the kettle.

Her hands feel slick and sweaty as she holds the kettle at the sink and fills it. Even when they’re on opposite ends of the kitchen, she can almost feel Brianna, leaning on her like she was a moment ago, tender pressure against her back as she retrieved the pan from the top shelf. She shuts the sink off just in time before the kettle overflows.

Regina’s entertained amorous thoughts of Brianna before, of course -- she likes her, fancies her, even. She’s gentle and pleasant to talk to, and her legs go on for centuries. But she’s never flustered Regina quite like this, where she’s bewildered such that she loses her quick-wittedness and cool demeanor. She can’t pinpoint why exactly it’s happening now.

 _But it’s happening,_ she thinks. She pops the lid on the kettle and walks it back to the stove.

Brianna is standing aimlessly in the kitchen entryway now, bobbing a little to the music. “I’ve got bread and peanut butter in the next to the sink. Nice and low to the counter so you can reach them,” she moves her hips just slightly in time with the beat as she says it, with a content smile on her face.

 _Brilliant_ , Regina thinks as she watches her.

“And you remember where the tea is? It’s just next to the toaster there,” Bri extends a hand.

Regina swallows and turns the stove on with a little noncommittal nod. “Yeah. I remember.”

“You’re the clammed-up one now, are you?” Brianna spins on the kitchen tile as the song picks up.

 _Bloody brilliant_ , Regina thinks.

“Brilliant,” she mumbles out. She steps away from the stove, half-intending to go to the cupboard for the bread and peanut butter.

“What’s brilliant?” Brianna’s little dances are becoming goofy and if Regina would smile if she weren’t stunned by a sudden and overwhelming discomposure.

“I…tea. Tea is brilliant,” Regina says distantly. Her mind is drifting back to their kiss earlier that day. And then to minutes ago, the feeling of Brianna against her. Just the weight of her against Regina’s own steadiness, like the two of them are rocks in a choppy sea.

Brianna says something bright and laughs, but Regina doesn’t catch it. Then she feels a hand on her shoulder and she looks over to see Brianna, holding one hand out, a doting glint in her eyes.

“Come dance with me,” she says. “Come on.”

Regina takes her hand and Brianna pulls her forward a bit forcefully into a twirl, and then they’re sort of careening through the kitchen. Brianna laughs. It takes Regina a second to find herself in the moment, and then she laughs too.

“We’ll break something,” she says.

They spin a wide circle again, Brianna’s arms slung over Regina’s shoulders, and Regina can smell her, she smells like coffee and something a bit sweet, maybe makeup or perfume.

“Doesn’t matter,” Brianna says. “It’s all a little broken.” She looks around at the bedsit. Then their multiform dance becomes ever stranger when Brianna pulls Regina closer, and guides them towards the kitchen entry in an almost-waltz. Regina laughs.

“You can’t dance. Probably because your legs are too long,” she feels almost uncomfortably warm and wishes there was anywhere to look besides Brianna’s face, or maybe she doesn’t wish that at all.

“Probably,” Brianna says.

Mid-spin, Regina’s back hits the refrigerator, and her hand finds the back of Brianna’s curly head, then she’s yanking her down into a kiss. The taller girl doesn’t resist for a moment, in fact, it’s almost a mirrored movement between the two of them, a moment in their brief relationship where they’re perfectly in sync, seemingly.

Regina doesn’t know what to do with her hands but she thinks fleetingly that she wants them in Brianna’s hair, so she grabs onto it with one and holds the other arm half-hoisted around her neck.

She suddenly becomes hyper-aware of Brianna’s hands on her hips; the way they’re slipping slowly across her back to draw her in closer, pulling her flush against Brianna. She feels each spot her hands brush burst, like a tiny firework, all through her limbs into the tips of her fingers and toes. And it feels serene, soothing to be close to Brianna like this, even as rousing tremors run the course of her body.

“Do you always taste like coffee?” Regina murmurs briefly against her lips. Brianna giggles and bends down a little, presumably to kiss Regina’s neck, but she can’t do so gracefully with her height. So she returns to her lips, and brushes a brief kiss over them again.

“I do, probably, but no one’s tasted me lately,” she says.

Regina has her witty response on the tip of her loosened tongue when the kettle starts squealing.

“Let me grab the cups,” Brianna bumps a little kiss against Regina’s forehead, and goes for the cabinets.

 


	9. not gonna kill you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> weepy confessions, weepier goodbyes, and a warning
> 
> (not gonna kill you - angel olsen)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HI OH MY GOD I'M SORRY FOR NOT UPDATING FOR SO LONG i work a lot and school's kicking my ass also this chapter isn't even good i'm so sorry
> 
> i have no excuses lmao hope you don't hate it
> 
> \- soph

_nine - not gonna kill you_

_a  love that never seems to curse or to confine_   
_w ill be forever never lost or too defined_   
_t o lose the feeling of an endless searching through_   
_h ow to have made what is never about me or you_

The following three weeks are logistics, extra shifts at work, and miscommunication. Brianna’s bedsit is cleared out -- she sold her ratty sofa to a university student, donated her cheap mattress of a bed, and left most of her important belongings with Melina and Johanna -- __‘_ If even one of these records has a scratch when I come back, I’ll be sorely disappointed in you both,’_ she’d said when she brought over her record collection the day before.

Brianna could tell Regina was thoroughly displeased with how long it took Brianna to activate her break clause and gain permission to end her tenancy in the bedsit. She hadn’t been shy about letting Brianna know, either -- she would huff loudly over tea, grow restless in the afternoon as Brianna pored over her tenancy contract and spoke on the phone with her landlord. Regina spent as many hours out of the flat as possible, taking pictures of anything and everything she could possibly turn into a coherent, concentrated collection. Then in the evenings she’d get quiet, though, and sit on Brianna’s bed fiddling with her camera. Brianna felt bad about keeping Regina from the artistic freedom of the open road, but she promised every day that they would be able to leave soon.

The long days were also characterized by furtive glances and outright refusal to address the sporadic and heated kisses between the two of them. Brianna thinks only of this on the night before their departure. She lays flat on her back on the hardwood floor, with Regina curled next to her, a shabby blanket under them and two pillows tucked beneath their heads.

_It’s truly ridiculous_ , Brianna thinks wryly, as she stares up at the ceiling. _How blatantly we’re making the same mistakes as before _.__ Then, her heart pounds: _I have to tell her. In some shape or form. I have to tell her._

Though they’ve kissed and cuddled up and held hands and the like, Brianna has managed to convince herself these instances exist out of desperation. _Regina’s been on the road for a while, after all,_ Brianna figured. _She’s probably touch-starved and needy, especially after that horror of an ex-fiance_.

And so things continue to go unsaid -- stretches of silence permeate between each gentle kiss and feverish make-out session. But Brianna knows, and it sends fear shuddering down her spine, that there are further conversations to be had, and tonight is the night they need to have them.

Brianna knows Regina didn’t buy the broken leg story, and she couldn’t blame her -- her telling of it was about as convincing as a five-year old’s white lie. Regina didn’t press the issue, and Brianna appreciates this, but it will come up again eventually. She’d like it to be by her own decision.

“Reg?” Brianna whispers, and her chest is hammering so loud she almost can’t hear herself.

“Hmm?” Regina hums and shifts, her back pressed against Brianna’s side.

“Are you awake?”

“No,” Regina mumbles. There’s a short silence, then Regina giggles sleepily. “What’s happening? Are you alright?”

“Yes,” Brianna says. “Are you?”

“’M just sleepy,” she rolls over so she’s facing Brianna, who rolls onto her side to look into Regina’s half-closed eyes.

“I was hoping you might be up for a little chat,” Brianna says softly. “Sorry, that sounds like I’m about to give you the sack or something.” She chuckles.

“Whadya want to chat about, sweets?” Regina yawns and scoots herself a little closer to Brianna, so her head rests just beside Brianna’s shoulder.

“Um…” Brianna begins, lifting herself up so she’s propped on her elbow. Regina’s eyes open fully then, and she looks up at Brianna inquisitively, her brows knitted slightly. “So, it’s been…what, two months nearly since we’ve met?”

“About that, I reckon,” Regina says, lifting her hand and holding one of Brianna’s curls, wrapping it around her ring finger gently. “Why?”

Brianna suddenly feels weak, and she lays on her back again. Her head pounds, and she takes in a sudden gulp of breath.

“Bri?” She hears Regina say next to her.

“I’m sorry…I always do this,” Brianna says between weak lungfuls of air. “I…I go mental whenever…whenever…”

Brianna knows Regina has taken notice of her anxiety. It’s in the foundation of her personality, but more than that, it’s been creeping up suddenly, more and more often, and demanding an embarrassing amount of attention.

“It’s alright, Bri, I don’t mind,” Regina says. Brianna feels a hand on her arm, brushing up and down against her skin slowly. “Take your time, whatever it is…you want to say.” She yawns and Brianna feels even worse.

Brianna tries to focus on the soft warmth of Regina’s hand, and on the sound of her slower breathing. She tries to match her pace.

“I just…I want to ask you,” Brianna says in a tight and breathy voice. “If you, um…well, we’ve been very, uh, close recently.”

“Do you mean all the snogging?” Regina says. A wave of uncomfortable heat creeps across Brianna’s face. She looks over at her in abject embarrassment. Regina’s grinning.

“W- um, yeah,” she stutters. “I j-just, well, there’s a reason I haven’t…um, let it…let it go further.”

Regina nods, and continues running her hand along Brianna’s arm. “I figured there was.”

“Do you…want it to…do you _want_ to…do those things?”

“Do I want to do more than kiss you? Of course,” Regina says. Her voice is steady and cognizant, not sleepy in the slightest anymore, but understanding, like she knows what’s coming. “But I know there’s something you don’t want to tell me so I haven’t pressed you.”

“Thanks,” Brianna mumbles absently.

Regina hums a reply and another silence falls.

“The thing is…” Brianna says. “The broken leg from two years ago. ‘S not true.”

“I know,” Regina says.

“I figured you knew.”

“You’re not a good liar.”

“Yeah.” Brianna hears herself laugh shortly. She gulps and then rolls on her side again, though it makes her fidgety to look into Regina’s calm eyes. “But the, um, injury bit. That bit’s true. I got…hurt, badly.”

Regina doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.

To Brianna’s absolute horror, her eyes begin prickling heatedly. “I have…a really big s-scar,” she says, choking on the last word a bit. She swallows furiously, fighting the tight pain in her throat that threatens to wreck her composure.

“What’s it from, love?” Regina says.

Her eyes sting and she can’t think of what words to say next.

Regina waits for her to talk.

A few anxious tears fall loose as Brianna recounts the events of that Halloween night and the days following for the first time to someone who wasn’t a doctor or a family member. She forgot what it feels like to say it all out loud -- __t_ hird-degree burns, skin grafts, permanent scarring_ -- it gives such power to the recovered wound itself, like her words infuse it with strength that transverses the time elapsed between then and now.

“...and Mel and Jo were the first people to see what it looked like under the bandages and all that, a-and they tried to tell me it didn’t look that bad but I remember Melina went really pale and had to sit down, and Tim-”

Brianna stops talking before the story is finished when she feels her voice giving out in her throat, cracking and bleeding like something half-healed. Regina is nestled tightly against her and muttering soothing things Brianna can’t totally make out.

“What about him, sweets?”

“He --” Brianna’s heart hammers so hard against her chest she’s sure Regina can feel it. “He just…he didn’t like me anymore after that.”

“Brianna,” Regina begins.

Brianna sighs in response and digs her fingernails into her palm. “The doctors told him that it would heal and that it wouldn’t…it wouldn’t look so gruesome forever, but he…he said he just couldn’t see me the same way.”

“Really?” Regina’s voice was thin and disbelieving.

“Really,” Brianna says. Her head is all pinpricks with a throbbing ache beneath it, and another mangled cry wrestles itself from her mouth as she tries to breathe deep. “And the worst part of all of it is that it’s my fault.”

Brianna has been told time and time again by Melina and Johanna that this isn’t true. And she knows, logically, they are right. She _knows _,__ and yet…

“I was being a petty little tease. An attention whore. I r-riled him up and got what was coming t-to me,” she takes sharp uncontrollable breaths. “I flirted with his mates to get him to pay attention to me. I-I mean, really. It was s-so childish, I was so _fucking_ stupid, I-”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Regina says weakly, patting Brianna on the head. Brianna cries harder.

“E-even if it isn’t…” She pauses and sniffles. “…My fault, it’s not his either. Th-there’s no one to b-blame or p-point at. No obvious villain, no malicious motives, no-” she laughs wryly. “No charges to press. God, I just…”

Brianna hears rattling breaths through Regina’s chest, feels her gently quivering hand running over her shoulder.

“He d-didn’t mean for me to fall,” Brianna says quietly. She’d explained this already but she reminds herself sometimes. “And he was apologetic, deeply. B-but…” Brianna forgets what she’s defending, and reduces her focus to her wet, choked breathing.

Above her, some time later, she hears a sniff, and a shaking exhale.

“Oh, no, are you crying too?” Brianna lifts herself up onto her elbow. Regina’s blue eyes are glassy and visibly red even in the darkness of the living room. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Reg, I’m s-”

“No, don’t apologize, just lay with me, please,” Regina wipes her eyes and reaches a hand towards Brianna’s shoulder.

Their tears settle. Brianna settles back against Regina’s side without complaint or question, and she falls asleep to the gentle touch of Regina’s head against her chest.

 

They both wake up with headaches.

“Crying dehydrates you,” Regina notes as they pull onto the main road, the van’s dusty dashboard illuminated by a fresh dawn.

“It’s been awhile since I fell asleep crying,” Brianna says, rubbing her forehead. Despite the aching, she feels better -- lighter, easier. Like there’s a closeness between her and Regina that hadn’t existed this time yesterday. Like a wall has been knocked down.

“You want to stop by the shop to say goodbye to Melina and Johanna, yeah?” Regina asks.

“If it’s not too much trouble before we leave town.”

“Not at all, sweets.”

“Thank you.”

The few things Brianna decided to keep and take with her on her voyage with Regina are stuck haphazardly in the back. The hollow echoed noise of an acoustic guitar being slammed about in its case fills the van whenever they turn a corner. At first it sets Brianna’s teeth on edge. The third time, she laughs.

“I’m driving as carefully as I can, promise,” Regina smiles as they round another turn.

“I trust you,” Brianna says. Regina gives her a meaningful glance.

The Northwest Moon isn’t busy for a weekday morning. As soon as they’re in sight of the front door Brianna feels her eyes watering yet again. She sees Melina behind the counter, fiddling with the register, and Johanna, who isn’t working but came all the same to say goodbye.

“Oh,” Brianna sighs to herself as Regina reaches for the shop’s front door.

“You alright?” Regina says.

Brianna sniffs. “Yes. I just…I’ll just miss them. Let’s go.”

Regina pulls the door open and its bell tinkles. Melina and Johanna look up simultaneously.

Regina makes herself scarce almost immediately and Brianna barely notices. An already teary-eyed Melina is rushing towards her, with Johanna at her heels. Brianna is suffocated in two tight embraces all at once.

“You absolute idiot, I’m going to miss you,” Brianna hears Johanna say, near her right ear.

“You really are such a fool, darling,” Melina near her left ear. “But I love you so dearly. Take care of yourself wherever you go.”

“We’ll be here when you come back,” Johanna says. “ _When_ you come back. You’re not leaving forever, I won’t let you.”

“Write us when you can.” Melina sniffles.

“Call us every day. Twice a day.” Johanna says sternly.

“Jo, we don’t even talk to her _that_ often now.”

Brianna’s cheeks are warm and flushed when her friends finally let her go, their faces just as pink, and in Melina’s case, tear-stained as hers.

“I’ll call and write as much as possible, my loves,” she says.

“You’d better,” Johanna’s blinking furiously and her voice is tight.

The three of them exchange silent, but loving glances, grasping at one another’s hands and delaying the moment of departure. Then Melina pipes up again,

“Where’s Regina, darling?” She scans the shop’s dining area. “Oh, there she is. That damned corner. I’ll be right back, lovies.” Melina wipes her eyes with her apron and then smiles at Johanna and Brianna.

“Wait, why?” Brianna asks.

“I just need a quick word with her,” Melina shrugs and turns to walk towards Regina.

“Why, though?” Brianna reaches out a hand to grab Melina’s arm but she’s too quick, and before Brianna can say anything else, Melina is plopping herself down next to Regina on a cushy armchair. “What’s she on about?” Brianna turns to Johanna and frowns.

Johanna smiles knowingly. “She’s just offering some friendly parting words. Nothing to worry about.”

Melina returns minutes later with a contented smile on her face, and Regina just behind her, looking much less peaceful.

“Shall I make you some coffees for the road, darlings?” Melina steps behind the counter again and looks at Brianna expectantly.

“I’ll take one,” she nods. “Reg?” She turns to look at the blonde girl.

Regina looks taken aback, then she clears her throat and looks at the ground. “Oh. I’m…no, I’m alright. Thank you.”

 

Regina seems deeply concentrated on driving for the rest of the morning and early afternoon. Brianna tries to engage her in conversation as the city thins out into sprawling country, but her replies are terse and clipped, so Brianna sips her paper cup of coffee and images shapes in the clouds.

The further they get from the city, the more Brianna’s mind reels.

_I think I’ve made a horrible mistake_ , she thinks as they pass a cluster of cows resting in the grass. It dawns on her like a smack across the face, that there is no tiny bedsit waiting for her when the sun goes down that day. If she were to demand right now that Regina take her back to the city, there would be no unmade, familiar bed awaiting her, no cramped kitchen, no potted plants on her windowsill. In this very moment, she is without a home. She feels lighter, weightless in a dangerous and unpleasant way. She wonders if this is how Regina feels all the time.

“Regina?” she says, quietly, after the clouds have become a homologous gray sheet and a gentle rain is peppering the windshield.

“What?” Regina replies. She has one hand dangling over the steering wheel, and the other is resting on her forehead.

“You alright?”

“Mhm.”

“Okay,” Brianna lifts one of her feet onto the passenger’s seat, tucks her knee beneath her chin, and begins picking at her shoelaces. “Are you sure?” she adds softly.

Regina sighs. “Yes, I just still have a headache, that’s all.” Regina leans forward and clicks the radio on. A heavy, fast-paced song screeches from the cheap stereo and Brianna winces.

As hard as she tries to entertain herself by wrapping the loose ends of her shoe laces around her fingers, Brianna is endlessly bored, curious, and needy. _Was it something Melina said?_ she thinks as she looks sideways at Regina, whose gaze seems to pass through the windshield unseeingly.

“Hey Reg?” Brianna’s heart thumps nervously.

“What?”

“What did Melina say to you, um, earlier?” Her voice cracks on the last word, and she prays to high heaven that Regina doesn’t think she’s crying for the third time in 24 hours.

Regina’s quiet for a moment, then shuts the radio off. “Just a cordial goodbye.”

“Why are you all out of sorts, then?”

Regina stares at her. “I’m not.”

“You’re not talking.”

“We can talk. What do you want to talk about?”

“What did Melina say to you?”

Regina groans. “I already told you.”

Brianna feels anger swell up inside her like hot steam all at once. “I told you my biggest secret last night. D-do you have any idea how horribly difficult that was? To tell you the truth?”

“What does that have to do with this?” Regina asks, her voice raising.

“I was honest with you. You won’t be honest with me.”

“There’s nothing to t-”

“Just tell me what Melina said to you, please, Reg,” her fist is clamped so tightly in her lap that she’s sure her palm could be bleeding.

Regina has both hands on the steering wheel now, her knuckles white. Her mouth is in a tight line. “She was warning me,” Regina mutters.

Brianna stares and waits for further explanation. “Warning you?”

Regina scoffs. “Yeah, warning me. Like a Dad warning a teenaged boy not to try anything with his daughter at the school formal.”

“Oh,” Brianna looks away. “What did she say?”

“She said, _Regina, Brianna is me and Jo’s best mate in the entire world. You’ve hurt her once already. If she comes back here in a month’s time with tears in her eyes…_ ” Regina stops, and sighs. Then she shrugs. “Just telling me off like I deserve, I suppose.”

Brianna doesn’t say anything at first, but her chest fills with warm, swelling love for Melina. “Don’t let her get in your head. Her and Jo are just…very vigilant. They became extremely protective of me after the whole…fire incident.”

“Do you think I’m going to hurt you?” Regina asks.

“W-what?”

“Why would Melina say that? Did you…did you tell her she needs to…I don’t know, be suspicious of me, or something? Do you trust me?” Her hands are shaking ever so slightly on the steering wheel and her eyes are stern. “Or is there a part of you that’s expecting me to fuck up again?”

Brianna’s mouth hangs open as she frowns at Regina. “Melina said that because she’s a good friend and she knows I’ve been hurt before,” she counters. “It hasn’t got anything to do with you. She’d say the same thing if it was anyone else.”

Regina’s taking deep breaths. “I’m sorry I left,” she says, so quietly Brianna almost thinks she’s talking to herself.

“I know you are,” Brianna says. “I’m not upset at you. And I don’t think you’re going to mess up again.”

Regina looks at her furtively.

“I really do trust you,” Brianna says. “Despite what Mel or Jo has to say about it. I don’t think-” she stops. “No, I __know__ that you won’t do that again.”

“Yeah?” Regina says weakly. “How can you be so sure? What if I’m actually a horrible person and you just don’t know it yet?”

Brianna says nothing for a beat or two and then makes up her mind in the span of three seconds. “Regina, do you want to be girlfriends?”

Regina’s hand slips on the steering wheel and she nearly sends them into a marsh. “What?” she stutters and looks at Brianna.

“I figure,” Brianna says. “If we call ourselves something official we’ll both be…less inclined to…” she stops. “To just…”

“Leave,” Regina finishes.

“Or to view one another as…um, temporary,” Brianna chooses her words carefully and quickly. “This isn’t temporary to me, anymore.”

“Me neither,” Regina smiles softly. “Girlfriend.”

Brianna thinks she could listen to Regina say that word to her over and over, until it becomes as lasting and native as breathing.


	10. end of desire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> an envelope, bad memories, and the first night in the van
> 
> (end of desire - muna)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YALL ARENT READY SKSKSKSKKSKSKDJDJK  
> the support on this fic means sooooo fucking much yall have no idea. you're all wonderful. i hope you enjoy chapter ten, we're officially halfway through :) i did something sort of special for this chapter and it's extra long. anyway. enjoy!  
> \- soph
> 
> CW: alcohol use, implied domestic abuse/harassment, sexual activities with lots of dialogue? praise kink??

_ten - end of desire_

_turn your head to the side, hold your gaze against mine_

_there it is, a mark of the divine_

The envelope that lives under the driver’s seat of the van is worryingly thin in Regina’s palm. She stares at it, finger running along the softened corner.

The passenger door opens. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Brianna pulling herself up into the passenger’s seat with a paper bag.

“Right, they didn’t have the salt and vinegar flavored ones, so I bought cheese and onion instead, is that alright? If you really hate the onion ones, I’ll take them, you can have the biscuits,” Brianna says, slightly out of breath. “Regina?”

Regina looks at her. “The cheese and onion ones are fine. Thanks.” She reaches for the bag of crisps.

They munch in silence in the parking lot of the convenience store, watching the cars on the main road. The sky is turning a deep, bluish grey. They will need to find somewhere to sleep soon. Their first day on the road has been relatively painless after the hiccup in the morning, which Regina is still struggling to let go of. Melina’s stringent warning had come quite too soon after Brianna’s tearful revelation the evening before for Regina to digest both properly.

“Oh, here’s your change,” Brianna digs a free hand into the pocket of her jacket and pulls out a few crumpled bills. She places them in Regina’s lap.

“Thanks,” Regina says.

“You alright?” Brianna says softly. Her eyes dart between her package of biscuits and Regina’s face.

“Yes, ‘m fine.”

“You’re not still upset about Melina?”

“No, lovie, ‘s not that.”

“I ought to ring her and g-”

Regina almost smiles. “No, no, I’m just completely knackered. We need to find…a caravan park or something like that.”

“My first night in the van. Quite exciting, innit?” Brianna shoots her a glace and then bites the edge off a biscuit.

A modest swell of excitement pulses in Regina’s chest. “Yes, I ‘spose it is. What ever shall we do to commemorate it?” She chuckles and raises an eyebrow at Brianna, who coughs through a mouthful of biscuit.

Biting back a laugh, Regina hands her a paper cup of cold tea from a stop earlier that day and Brianna tips it back.

“I mean…I…we-” Brianna clears her throat, staring at the biscuits in her lap. “I. I don’t really…um…”

“Got you flustered, have I?” Regina chuckles, stuffing the bills in her lap back into the envelope and sticking it under the driver’s seat. “You’ve had your tongue down my throat multiple times now and I’ve still got you blushing at the mention of -”

"Oh -” Brianna covers her face with one hand. “Oh, hush, will you?”

Regina smirks and puts down her crisps and starts up the van. She worries she’s genuinely upset Brianna for a moment, but then she sees a little smile on her lips out of the corner of her eye as she backs out of the car park.

 

When they’re on the main road again, Brianna clicks on the radio.

_Well, it’s plain to see, you were meant for me, yeah, I’m your boy, your twentieth century toy…_

“Oh, I quite like this one,” Brianna mumbles, her forced casual tone barely audible over the song. Regina sees her shifting around in her seat.

“Did I upset you?” Regina asks.

Brianna looks at her, startled for a second. “No,” she says then.

“Are you sure?” Regina squints out at the quickly-darkening road and turns her headlights on. “Because I mean it, I’m never going to…ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. I’d never do that.”

Brianna sighs and her head falls back against the headrest.

“What?” Regina asks.

“You’re a dream, aren’t you?” she looks at her with a small smile.

Regina isn’t sure what she means. She laughs shortly, then frowns. “What d’ya mean?”

Brianna waits a moment. “I just mean you’re wonderful, that’s all.”

“’M not wonderful. Just not an absolute dick, I like to think.” Regina says with a little laugh.

“But a man would never wait this long for me,” Brianna mutters, pulling a thread on her jumper sleeve. “A man’s never waited this long for me.”

Regina’s throat contracts at the soft, thin quality of Brianna’s voice. “Their loss,” she says.

Brianna sighs shakily. “Tim, he couldn’t even wait two weeks after the accident. When I said I’d need longer, he…” She stops. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to think about him tonight.”

“You were recovering from life-threatening burns and the bastard couldn’t go two weeks without having a shag. Christ, I’d like to hit him.”

“You, Mel, and Jo,” Brianna says fondly.

They listen through the end of the song, and then when an advertisement for a used car dealership comes on, she speaks up again.

“See, the thing is,” Brianna begins. “It’s…it’s the, um, scar. I don’t…like how it looks.”

“I’ve got a wonky mole on my arse, it’s alright,” Regina laughs and taps Brianna on the arm playfully. Brianna laughs shakily in response.

“I’m serious, Reg,” she says. “It’s all across my hip and stomach, and part of my chest. It’s a right dreadful sight.”

“So’s my strange mole.”

“Regina!”

“Alright, alright, ‘M sorry. But I mean it, don’t lose your head over it, sweets. Like I said, I’ll wait however long you want.”

Brianna doesn’t say anything, but her hazel eyes are glassy in the dark. Then she looks out the window at the dark road as another song begins on the radio.

 

And Regina means it, she would wait forever if Brianna wanted. Because no man had ever waited for her, either, when she needed it. The word _girlfriend_ has been thrumming through her mind between thoughts of Melina’s warning and of what’s going to happen if they run out of money. _She’s my girlfriend,_  Regina thinks affectionately. _My girlfriend. Brianna May is my girlfriend._

Regina has never had a girlfriend. The thought of having one has crossed her mind before, though never seriously, before Brianna. She thought of it in California, when she’d run crying from her fiance’s apartment and end up at the front doors of her artist friends. They were men, and women -- but there was a stark difference in the way they treated a crying, hopeless girl. The men; entitled art journalists and sensitive poets, would invite her in and offer her drinks. They’d sit very close to her on the couch, and rest their hands on her thigh. “Sounds like Vern isn’t treating you right, is he?” they’d say. Her tear-stained cheeks and red eyes didn’t seem to deter them, rather, they seemed delighted by her helplessness. Sometimes she would put out, just for a place to stay. Other times she would walk home in the dark and hope Vern didn’t hear her come in.

Her female friends, they were different. On a sweaty summer evening one August, Regina was drunk and angry, crying alone in the apartment. On the coffee table was a stack of her best Polaroids, each with cigarette burns on the middles, spread out haphazardly like they’d been tossed there on the culprit’s way to the door. On the corner of the table was a yellow sticky note, covered in blue script: _Next time, don’t come home wearing another man’s jacket. - V_

“You have to leave him,” her painter friend Sylvia had said over the phone.

“Fuck him,” Regina spat out as she glared down at the note. “ _Fuck_ him. He’s been fucking that utter _airhead_ gingerfrom the gallery every other night and he _knows_ I know. An’ he’s going off on _me?_ For wearing _my_ mate’s jumper? Fuck him, _fuck_ him.” She kicked the leg of the table and felt her big toe throb with pain. She slumped onto the couch and spilled gin across her unevenly buttoned blouse. “I hate him. The bastard.”

“Leave him. You can come stay with me.”

Regina sniffled. “You know. If I was a man, and I had a girl, I’d treat her well. ‘S not even hard. He jus’ can’t manage it. ‘Cause he’s just a stupid,” she used her free hand to sweep an armful of ruined Polaroids onto the carpet. “…tactless, careless bastard.”

“You’re dunk. Please come over, Regina, will you? We can decide what to do in the morning.”

“He jus’ doesn’t know how to handle me, see,” Regina slurred into the phone. “Can’t handle a girl who…who’s a better artist than him. ‘S not my fault he’s a worthless sculptor. Can’t paint for shit. Can’t write. He’s insecure-”

“I know he is, Regina. Come over, okay?”

“N-”

Then she dropped the whole glass onto her lap as the front door opened suddenly behind her, and he came in, his face in shadow, until he stepped into the yellow light of the sitting room’s lamp.

“Vern,” Regina mumbled, pushing herself to the further end of the sofa and taking the empty glass out of her lap. She pressed _end call_ on the phone.

“You’ve looked better,” he said, quietly, soberly. Regina glared at him.

“I’ve been better,” she spat at him, placing the wet glass carelessly on the carpet. “You absolute fucking prick. Those were my _best pictures_. That’s a whole section out of my portfolio an’ it’s just ruined. You’re…you…” A fresh, hot wave of furious tears was pooling at her lash line as she got to her feet, unsteadily. “

“ _Those_ are your best?” His laugh was a harsh bark. He stepped forward and tugged at the already-loose tie around the collar of his stained shirt. Bending down, he picked a photograph off the top of the pile. “What’s this one? Sylvia? At the beach? Do you know how many fucking _Sylvia at the beach pictures_  there are out there? They’re boring. All of them. It’s nothing special. Spare me the tears, too, sweetheart.” He tossed the photo to the ground and then kicked Regina’s empty glass hard, sending it to shatter on the frame of a bookcase. Regina yelped. Then she turned on him.

“At least I have an…I have an _artistic vision,_ ” she slurred at him, halfway between a yell and a cry. “You’re not an artist, you…you’re an untalented…greedy little-”

Within seconds, the coffee table was on its side, and the phone went skittering across the tile floor in the adjacent kitchen. Vern flipped it with one arm; it was a cheap thing, and suddenly it felt like a manifestation of the cheap threads holding the two of them together.

“You’re a _child_ ,” he shouted at her. “A delusional naive child. Who let you think _you’re_ some visionary gift from the gods? I mean, _beach pictures_ , you call that artistic vision?”

“ _You_ did! It was you! _God_ , I fucking-” Regina had an insatiable urge to lunge at him, to throw him into the wall and bash his head against it till he stopped moving. The tipped-over coffee table rested between them, Regina’s Polaroids scattered at Vern’s feet. “The first time I met you an’ you said I was _impressive_. D’you know how good that made me feel? I needed validation so badly and you _knew_ it and that’s why you said it. You’re all the fucking same. You all do it. You prey on girls who just want to be good at something.” She sniffled and put a hand on her forehead.

“Who? Who’s ‘all’?” he said, chest heaving.

“All you artist men. You’re all cowards who can’t get women…without manipulating them.” She sat back down and looked at him, her stomach lurching at the look in his eyes. “You never thought I was good, you said it to get me in bed.”

“I could get much better-looking women in bed than you, don’t flatter yourself,” he muttered, his head hanging like he was suddenly five shots into a binge.

“Go get them, then. Go shag that bitch from the gallery. I’m going over to Sylvia’s.” Regina started pulling her hair out of her face and into a lopsided ponytail.

Vern laughed mirthlessly. “Sylvia’s. Of course.”

“What about her?” Regina spat, holding her head in her hands and trying to shake the fuzzy feeling from her brain.

“Maybe those fear-mongering preachers are right for once. That all the women are ditching their men for other women, now, huh?”

She stared at him incredulously. He raised his eyebrows.

“Say, that’s a splendid idea,” she growled, staggering towards the kitchen counter to grab her handbag. “Maybe I’ll drop you for someone who respects me, hmm? Someone like Sylvia?”

“You’re not fucking funny.”

“I’m not being funny.”

“You won’t last in the gallery circuits on your own. You’re barely twenty one.”

“Sylvia will take care of me, then, since you’re doing such a bang-up job of it.”

He lunged for her arm but she dodged out of his way just in time, falling towards the front door and leaning her weight against it as she reached for the doorknob.

She ran down the hallway of the apartment building towards the stairwell without much concern for whether she kept her balance or not, and she heard Vern shouting behind her, incomprehensible and piercing as a siren.

Sylvia and her friends were a tight-knit group of free spirits, around 5 or 6 women. They all lived in a warehouse in the middle of a quite dumpy part of the city. When Regina showed up, they made her a space on the floor, and they all fell asleep to the noise of slow jazz radio coming from the portable radio. They demanded nothing of her, and their words were soft, but not timid -- like they were treating wounds they’d healed before. They surrounded and mended her like a bird with broken wings.

 

Begrudgingly, Regina pays the caravan park ground’s director the small fee for the overnight stay.

“Thought these things were free,” she grumbles, handing him a bill from her envelope. The director, slouched in a small shack by the caravan park entrance, sighs, and takes it.

“Not the nice ones. Here’s your change. Good night.” He drops a few coins into her open palm. She stares down at them nervously, then drops them in the envelope and trudges back to the van, parked at the farthest end of the park, by a riverbed.

She passes a few other vans and RVs, whose occupants already seem to be asleep. A light right is beginning, and Regina suddenly feels very cold and deserted. She picks up her pace through the darkness.

She pulls open the van’s back doors just as she feels raindrops sprinkling her cheeks.

“I see you’re already nice and cosy, aren’t you?” Regina smiles. Brianna is tucked under a woolly blanket, reading a book balanced against her knees. In one hand she’s holding a torch aloft, its soft yellow glow tinting her flushed face even warmer. “Are you cold in here? You’re pink.”

“It’s a bit nippy,” Brianna says, smiling gently and folding down a corner of her book page.

Regina puts her envelope between her teeth so she can hoist herself into the back of the van -- first stepping up into it, then leaning out again to pull the doors closed behind her. They shut with a thud, and then it’s dark and quiet. Some bluish light filters through the windshield behind them, from the LED _Overnight Parking_ sign that faces the main road.

“Looks like moonlight,” Brianna notes as she shuts her torch off.

“Romantic,” Regina says with a little laugh, unlacing her boots and yanking them off. She tosses them one by one behind her onto the driver’s seat, where Brianna’s are neatly laid. Then she unzips her jacket and plops it alongside the boots. “Did you want to get changed into something more comfy to sleep in?”

“Already did. While you were gone,” the bluish cast from the sign illuminates the angular slant of Brianna’s long nose, the timid curves of her lips. Her downcast eyes and her ceaseless hair. Regina feels a shiver coast through her limbs. “I’ve got a proper thick jumper to keep me warm.” Brianna nods down at the knit sweater she’s wearing.

“There’s lots of ways to keep warm, Bri,” Regina says before she can think better of it, feeling herself grow chilly, now without a jacket or boots. She shoots a genial gaze at Brianna before crawling next to her, their feet towards the van’s back doors, and lifting the mass of blankets to invite herself into them.

Brianna reaches behind them to place her torch and book on the center console between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. Then she sighs, and it turns into a yawn.

“Ready for sleep, sweets?” Regina shimmies her jeans off under the comforter, then sits up to wrangle her bra off and out from under her jumper.

“What are you doing?” Brianna asks through a half-formed smile. “It’s cold in here, don’t shed layers.”

“I can’t sleep in jeans, they’ll get all out of shape. Besides, I’ll just cuddle my legs up next to yours to keep them nice and cosy, alright?” Regina wraps her jeans and bra into a heap and adds them to the uneven pile of things in the van’s front end.

They both settle in -- trying to force the lumpy sleeping pad laid on the van’s floor into something semi-comfortable, trading pillows and stuffing the extra ones around them like a little nest against the cold. Brianna flattens out parts of the comforters and blankets that bunch up, as to evenly distribute their cover.

“It’s not so bad after a few nights,” Regina says, flat on her back, staring at the van’s ceiling. “The muddy, alcohol smell. And the aches, from sleeping all wonky…I suppose those don’t go away but you learn to live with it,” she yawns. “Like anything else.”

“It’s brilliant,” Brianna says softly as she lays down and rolls onto her side, facing Regina. “A bit cramped for my gargantuan legs, but what place isn’t?”

Regina turns onto one side to look at Brianna, and as her eyes adjust in the dark, she sees the older girl holding a soft gaze against hers; something gentle, sleepy, safe.

“What’re you staring at?” Regina whispers with a tired smile.

Brianna sighs and tucks her arm beneath her head as she scoots closer to Regina. “Nothing. Just my sleepy eyes having their way.” She grins.

“Christ, it really is getting colder by the night, isn’t it?” Regina sniffles and pulls the blanket closer to her chest. She looks at Brianna briefly and then shimmies herself forward to press against Brianna’s front, tucking her head just under the taller girl’s chin. “That’s better,” she whispers. She feels a soft chuckle from Brianna’s chest.

They lay quietly for an unknowable amount of time, and when Regina finds she can’t drift off as easily as she hoped, she syncs her breaths with Brianna’s, and imagines their breaths to be poetry over an uneven beat on rainfall on the van’s tin rooftop.

She isn’t sure if Brianna is asleep, but her slow, deep breathing tells Regina she probably is. She sighs deeply.

“Bri?” She whispers against the sweet-smelling fabric of her jumper. She feels movement against her, the brush of curls against the top of her head.

“Yes? Are you okay?” Brianna mutters.

“I’m sorry, were you sleeping?”

“I was nearly there.”

“Oh, damn it. I’m sorry, love, go back to sleep.”

“No, what’s wrong?”

Regina tilts her head upward slightly to look into Brianna’s face, creased by a frown. “It’s really nothing, I just couldn’t sleep. That’s all.”

Brianna smiles at her then, and cranes her neck downward to perch a gentle kiss on Regina’s forehead.

Regina hums softly, then frees one of her hands, lifting it to brush some hair out of Brianna’s face so the LED glow from outside will paint her pale face slightly blue. Then she runs her palm over Brianna’s cheek and ushers her downward gently, to touch her lips with hers.

Their faces are both cold to the touch, but warmth erupts within Regina at the kiss, and it radiates into her aching, chilly fingers and toes. Brianna tastes like tea, and a slight twinge of peppermint lip balm that always seems to coat her lips.

Then Brianna nips her lower lip softly. Regina sighs and lowers her hand to the collar of Brianna’s jumper, yanking her closer. She topples onto her with a gasp as their foreheads knock together.

“Ouch,” Brianna giggles.

“Apologies,” Regina says breathlessly, gaze traveling from Brianna’s lips and back up to her eyes. Brianna only smiles, and goes back in to kiss Regina. Then she gasps again when the younger girl’s hands find her hips and pull her flush against her. A tangle of curly hair falls over Regina’s face.

“Maybe I can help you fall asleep,” Brianna says. Regina can barely see her face in the blue darkness. They breathe against each other for a moment.

As she registers what Brianna said, her heartbeat goes uneven and her lower stomach tightens, not unpleasantly. “What do you mean, Bri?”

“Um,” Brianna shifts against her. “I just mean…well, I don’t know. I want to keep kissing you. And more. I…suppose. I, uh…”

Regina squints at her but pulls her back in for a deeper kiss all the same. “Perhaps I can loosen your lips with mine, hm?” she laughs between kisses, and Brianna laughs back somewhat shakily.

Regina slides her hands to rest on the waist of Brianna’s sweatpants, and the older girl jolts, almost imperceptibly, but Regina feels it. Brianna draws back for a moment, sitting back on her heels.

“Sorry,” Regina says. “Did I do something wrong?” She keeps her voice soft.

Brianna shakes her head. “No,” she says, her eyes traveling up and down Regina’s body as her chest heaves. Then she licks her lips. Running a hand through Regina’s hair, she tugs softly, and bows down to press her mouth below her jaw. Regina tenses, and a high-pitched hum escapes her at the sensation on her delicate skin.

Brianna kisses the spot softly first. The feeling of her breath against her neck was enough to break Regina out in shivers, but then she bites her, tenderly. Regina’s grip on her hips clenches, and she whines a little as her mind slides into a bewitching hyperdrive, spinning and coursing like heat in her veins.

“Brianna...” she says softly, breathing in the scent of Brianna’s hair. The older girl hums inquisitively against her neck. “Brianna, stop for a moment.”

Brianna rolls off Regina and looks at her. “What is it?”

“Are you…” Regina begins, getting up slightly and leaning back on her elbows. “Have you ever been with a girl before?”

Even in the dim light, she can see a pink tint dust Brianna’s cheeks.

“No,” she says quietly. “Have you?”

Regina shakes her head. “But I wanna make you feel good, Brianna,” she says.

Brianna chews on her lower lip and looks down at her hands for a second.

Regina’s heart falls. “Or we can just cuddle up and go to sleep, of course, my love,” she assures her. “Nothing has to happen past this, I meant it.”

Brianna smiles in an unreadable sort of way, then lunges forward to put both her hands on Regina’s cheeks and kiss her more eagerly. Regina makes a small noise of surprise but returns the passion all the same, and the rising heat in her belly oozes slow through her entire abdomen.

 “I said I’d help you fall asleep,” Brianna smiles and slips her hand below the collar of Regina’s shirt and rubs her thumb along her collarbone. “I may not know what I’m doing but I’ll do my best, yes?” She grins.

Regina isn’t sure entirely what’s going to happen but she feels it might be too good to be true. “I thought you didn’t want-” she cuts herself off with a dainty sigh as Brianna runs the tips of her fingers lightly over the sensitive dip between her collarbone. “Didn’t want to do this yet.”

“I said I wasn’t ready for you to see the scar,” Brianna mumbles, her gaze shifting. “But I’d still love to take care of you.” Her eyes are curious and hopeful. “There’s time for me later.”

She leans into to kiss Regina again but she stops her. “Are you sure?” Regina says.

“Yes, now let me kiss you,” Brianna chuckles.

“Well-” Regina frowns. “You don’t have to do anything just because it’s…what you think I want you to do,” she says.

“I want to,” Brianna says quickly. Regina feels her move her hips against hers. The sudden pressure on her lower stomach draws a breathy whimper from her mouth.

When Regina doesn’t say anything, Brianna says, “I promise, Reg.”

They stare at each other for a moment or two, then Regina bites her lower lip and smiles. “Go on then,” she nods.

Brianna returns to kissing and sucking down her neck, treating each spot with appreciative fervor. Then Regina feels her fingers brush near her hip and across the hem of her jumper.

“Take it off,” Regina says. “It’s alright, take it off.”

Brianna pulls it over Regina’s head with both hands. As she drops it to the side, Regina hears a sharp intake of breath from Brianna.

“You’re so sexy,” Brianna breathes as Regina lays down again. The words go straight to Regina’s core, and the wild thrumming in her stomach fluctuates. She’s never heard Brianna utter something so sensual without stuttering it between kisses. She feels out of breath and light-headed with the need to have Brianna’s hands on her.

“Who, me?” Regina giggles as she catches her breath. The longer Brianna looks over her bare chest, her hazel eyes alight, the warmer Regina feels between her legs. The task of staying still is growing difficult.

“Yes you, you sexy thing,” Brianna mutters lowly. She reaches out a hand and trails three fingers up from the waistband of Regina’s knickers up between her breasts with a feather-light touch.

Regina groans. “Come here,” she pulls Brianna down to her again . “Now do something.”

“What shall I do?” Brianna teases, her eyes still grazing over Regina’s breasts.

“Anything, I swear to God Br-“ Regina’s words fade into a long sigh when Brianna rubs her thumb over her nipple suddenly, in a moment of confidence Regina didn’t know the older girl possessed. 

“How’s that?” Brianna says with a little smirk.

“Again, more,” Regina can’t help but raise her hips up a little to meet Brianna’s.

“So bossy,” Brianna bends to run her lips between Regina’s breasts, and the younger girl’s chest heaves. Then, she moves to the left slightly, and swirls her tongue around Regina’s nipple, looking up at her through her eyelashes.

“How’ve you never….done this before?” Regina says breathily as she watches. “You look…so lovely.”

“Hush,” Brianna smiles at her.

“I mean it.”

Brianna only laughs shakily and then kisses the side of Regina’s other breast gently, before placing one hand on her thigh.

“Get on with it, will you?” Regina’s hips are rolling, grinding up against nothing hopelessly, her efforts to stay still abandoned. Then she yelps as she feels Brianna’s two hands on her upper thighs, forcing her down again.

“I’ll take my time, thank you very much,” Brianna says. The feeling of her strong, wide hands in tandem with her gentle but commanding voice sends Regina into a desperate tailspin. “What would you like me to do next?” Brianna hums against her chest.

Regina’s brain short-circuits. “Anything. More. Where I need it.”

To her confusion, Brianna comes back up near her face again. Then her fingers tease at the waistband of her knickers. “Tell me if I’m doing alright,” Brianna whispers to her before she drifts three fingers across the light fabric, using a soft touch at first, and then drawing slow circles.

“That’s it,” Regina nearly dissolves into the blankets from the relief of finally gaining some friction on her throbbing core. “Oh my god. Harder.”

Against her commands, Brianna slides her fingers lower, to Regina’s still-covered entrance, and presses against it. “You’re all wet,” she teases, muttering against her neck. “What’s all this from?”

“You, it’s from you, you know that, you tease,” Regina almost laughs at the difference in Brianna’s demeanor as each moment passes. The shyness flows off her like the heat between the two of them melts her inhibitions and hang-ups, leaving behind a tender authority that sends gratifying palpitations through Regina.

“Let’s get these off you,” Brianna leans back onto her heels and hooks two long fingers under the waistband of Regina’s knickers. Regina sighs shakily and deeply.

“Yes, thank fuck,” she whines, lifting her hips. Brianna tugs them off and casts them aside before taking Regina by the thighs, and gently spreading them apart, so Brianna’s positioned between them. Regina grabs at one of her own nipples desperately.

“Put your hand away, I’m taking care of you,” Brianna says, leaning down to press a kiss to Regina’s tummy.

Regina raises her eyebrows and grabs the other nipple, too. “What if I say no?”

Then Brianna slips one finger over her folds, using the lightest touch, before delving between them right below her clit.

Electricity prickles all along Regina’s skin as she cries out, breathy and high-pitched. She’s taken aback such that her hands fly to Brianna’s shoulders, yanking her down and clinging to her like her life depends on it.

Brianna giggles softly into her neck, then bites lightly below her ear. Then she resumes her slow circles on Regina’s clit -- this time with two fingers, and with a considerable amount of pressure. Regina doesn’t think she’s ever been so riled up in her life.

“I want you so badly,” she blurts out, her fists kneaded into Brianna’s curly hair. “Never wanted anyone this badly. Ever.”

Brianna sucks at her lower neck, and Regina’s sure it will leave a mark. “You can have me,” Brianna says breathlessly between kisses up across Regina’s jaw back to her lips once more.

They lock eyes and another long, rising wave of pleasure glides through Regina’s limbs to the tips of her fingers and toes. Brianna’s mouth is open very slightly, then she takes her lower lip between her teeth, like she’s concentrating, and it only drives Regina crazier.

“Am I doing alright?” Brianna asks timidly, and there’s a sudden softness in her eyes.

“Y-you’re doing wonderfully,” Regina nod. “A little faster.”

Brianna uses her free hand to pinch one of Regina’s nipples and her other hand increases its pace. The combination of sensations tips Regina into new territory. She lurches up into the touch, and a long moan leaves her as easily as breath.

“Fuck, fuck, keep doing that,” she pants.

“You look so beautiful, so gorgeous,” Brianna kisses her again, and Regina moans against her mouth.

“Say it again,” Regina says before she can think better of it. “And…harder, go harder.”

Brianna tightens her circular motions on Regina’s clit, before sliding three fingers down her folds to gather their wetness. Before Regina has time to complain, Brianna resumes her circles, slick and swift. “You’re the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen, Regina, you’re so pretty like this,” she repeats.

Regina practically implodes at the sound of those words in Brianna’s gentle, soft voice. “I’m almost there,” she huffs. “Look at me.” She puts one hand on Brianna’s cheek and angles her gaze against hers. The focused stare of her hazel eyes, the way she bites her lip to concentrate, the curls falling across her face -- it all makes Regina shiver again. “Keep looking at me. Wanna see your face when I-” She loses track of her words as Brianna does something _just_ right -- a combination of a gentle brush across her nipple and a quick circle around her clit.

“Come,” Brianna whispers to her. “I wanna see you come. You’re so beautiful.”

Regina’s breathing so deeply her lungs must have gained capacity. Each breath comes and leaves as a whine, a moan; Regina barely remembers they’re in a public caravan park. They could be anywhere, or nowhere, or everywhere.

“Hottest thing in the world,” Brianna mumbles, a little out of breath.

Then, Regina feels as if as if she’s overflowing, pleasure spilling over and into the furthest reaches of her body. Her hips jolt upwards and roll back down uncontrollably, and her thighs clamp against Brianna’s hips. Were she in any other situation, she would have been embarrassed at her emphatic moaning, but she barely registers it as her own voice now.

“Oh my god, holy fuck, Brianna,” she clutches to the older girl’s shoulders tightly as she shudders through her high. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I love you.”

Brianna holds her gaze steadily, a doped-out sort of expression crossing her face as she watches Regina. She rubs Regina’s clit until the younger girl pushes her hand away gently. “I love you too,” Brianna says, smiling.

Regina’s chest is heaving after she finishes and she’s suddenly very away of how naked she is, compared to how clothed Brianna is.

“My god,” she breathes. “Hand me my jumper, will you? I’m gonna get cold.”

Brianna only giggles, lays back down next to Regina, and pulls the thick blankets back up over the two of them. “Let me keep you warm, Reg,” she says.

Regina wipes some sweat from her forehead. “Oh, I’m all gross. I need a shower.” She groans but scoots herself towards Brianna regardless. She resists crying out at the sensation of blankets against her still-sensitive core.

“No, you’re just lovely,” Brianna mutters. “Think you can sleep now?”

“Absolutely,” Regina’s eyes are already closed as she settles into Brianna’s arms.

 

 


	11. real love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> sugar, coming home, and antiques
> 
> (real love - big thief)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly i'm just never going to be a fast updater lol i just finished moving and taking finals so i;m... sleepie  
> anyway. enjoy  
> \- soph 
> 
> CW: hospitals and angst

_eleven - real love_

_real love makes your lungs black_

_real love is a heart attack_

_(big thief)_

Brianna offers to drive the next day.

“Have you ever driven something that size before?” Regina asks, pointing out to the van from the convenience store window.

“No. It can’t be too different, ‘specially on these big open roads, can it?” Brianna squints outside at it as she lifts the coffee pot from its burner. The cheap machine hisses.

“You’d be surprised.”

“Let me have a go at it.”

Regina shrugs and stirs a packet sugar into her coffee. Then she reaches for a second packet.

“Two sugars today?” Brianna hums absently as she presses a plastic lid onto her cup.

“No,” Regina says, ripping open the second packet. She tips it lightly into the coffee, letting nearly half of it spill. “One and…three sevenths.” She throws away the remaining four sevenths in the nearby sticky trash bin.

“Pardon me?”

“One and three sevenths. It’s the exemplary amount. I’ve perfected the ratio.”

Brianna’s quiet for a moment as Regina pops a lid onto her coffee.

“That’s ridiculous,” she mutters then.

“No, it’s the perfect level of sweetness. Are you going to drive or not?” Regina smiles and elbows Brianna.

They bring their coffees and armfuls of junky snacks to the cash register. Regina turns away from Brianna slightly as she rummages through her envelope for the correct bills. Brianna frowns as she watches her back. Then Regina sighs as she places the notes on the counter and pushes them forward.

“Everything okay?” Brianna mutters.

Regina looks at the cashier and then to Brianna. “Yes,” Regina crosses her arms and thanks the cashier stiffly as she collects her items. Brianna reaches for hers and they walk out to the van.

“Alright, give me the keys,” Brianna says as the door shuts between them. The early morning sky is a chilly lilac, with clouds rolling in for another day of rain. It’s so cold their words come out with puffs of steam as they walk to the van. Regina tosses the keys to Brianna as they reach it.

“Warm up the van, I’m going to go make a call really quick, alright?” Regina says. She opens the passenger door and tosses a few bags of crisps onto the seat. Brianna looks at her as she pulls herself into the driver’s seat.

“Is everything alright?” Brianna asks, eyeing Regina’s furrowed brow and the way her fingers are tapping against her paper coffee cup.

Brianna frowns as she watches Regina step carefully across the thin layer of ice accumulating across the pavement. The payphone mounted against the heavily-vandalized brick siding of the convenience store looks grimy and untouched, like even those desperate for a phone call would pass up its services. It worries Brianna.

_Who is it she’s calling?_ Brianna thinks. _Why’s she not called anyone till now? I haven’t seen her use a phone to call anyone but me, have I?_

Brianna puts the keys in the ignition while keeping an eye on the blonde back of Regina’s head, ducked in the kiosk against the chilly wind. The van sputters into life and the musty smell starts drifting from the vents along with cold air. Brianna shudders and twists the heater to its highest setting.

Over the sound of the heater roaring, Brianna hears a muffled shout. She looks up. Regina has the payphone in one hand, and rubs her forehead with the other. She’s talking animatedly; loud enough that Brianna can make out she’s angry, but not clear enough for her to parse out the words. Brianna bites her lip and takes a sip of her coffee.

The heater is warmed up now and the van’s windows are beginning to steam up. Brianna watches a droplet of condensation accumulate along the top of the windshield. She thinks of the night before and feels her tense shoulders fall and her chest flutter pleasantly. It was more than she could have hoped for, getting to show Regina how much she loved and desired her. And she was so divine, so delicate in her hands, like a flower blooming. Brianna wonders if she’ll be able to focus on driving with the memory of last night in her mind.

Just as she’s starting to get uncomfortably shifty in her seat, the passenger’s door is flung open and Regina gets in with a huff.

Brianna stares at her. Her eyes are bright, staring down at her coffee in her hands. “We’re out of money.”

 

 

“I’d had it all planned out before I left,” she says as they pull onto the main road. “My boss gave me some compensation to work on the project and I had it split up into these even paychecks. But it’s just…things are taking longer than I thought. I have less than half the money left that I’m supposed to.”

Brianna stares blankly out at the road with both hands clasped tightly onto the steering wheel. “What did your boss say?”

“She said she can’t give me anything more. I’m already a risky investment as a new contributor for the magazine.” Regina has her head leaned against the window with one hand over her eyes.

“I have a little money,” Brianna says. “I don’t have a lot but I have…the money from my last paycheck, and from selling my sofa, and-”

“I don’t want your money, Brianna.”

“It’s not for you, it’s for us. It’s _us_ , now.”

Regina looks over at her. “I ‘spose it is.”

“We’ll find a cash machine in the next town and I’ll get my money out. Don’t worry too much, alright, love?” Brianna says softly. She takes one hand off the steering wheel and puts it on Regina’s knee.

“How much do you have?” Regina asks weakly.

“I…well, I don’t know for sure, but…”

“This is a disaster,” Regina mumbles against her hand.

“Don’t say that,” Brianna says. “Look, you haven’t got that much work left to do on your portfolio, have you?”

Regina glares at her and brushes her hand off her knee. “I have about six mediocre half-finished collections and none of them make sense. I was supposed to be nearly done by now and I haven’t gotten anything finished in nearly a month and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do and-” She takes in a gulp of air. “Oh my god, I’m going to single-handedly ruin the next issue of the magazine. I’ll be back to sofa surfing around California with no job.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Brianna says softly, choosing her words carefully. “I meant what I said, alright? It’s _us_. You aren’t on your own and if…if everything falls to bits, I’ll be with you.”

Regina sighs shakily. “I don’t think either of us can be trusted to make responsible decisions, do you?”

Brianna swallows and a few large raindrops smack the windshield. “I think we’re fine.”

“You think so?” Regina replies, her tone clipped. “I live in a van and you quit your job to run off with a girl who lives in a van. I’d say we aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box.”

Brianna takes a deep breath. “Just breathe, alright?”

“ _You_ breathe.”

“Regina.”

“What?”

“Relax.”

“ _You_ relax, you’re the one who can’t go two days without going all mental.”

Brianna’s mouth goes dry and she grips the steering wheel tightly. “Let’s just be quiet then.”

“Good. I don’t feel like talking.”

 

 

The silence is deafening, but soon is drowned out by a punishing rainfall. Brianna doesn’t dare look at Regina. Her words -- _you can’t go two days without going mental _-__ \- sting like fire on the inner coils of her brain. She tries to focus on the sound of the rain -- the drumbeat against the windows, but nothing makes the words quieter, nothing dulls them, nothing takes their edge off.

Brianna remembers her first day home from the hospital as one of her happiest days ever. It was the eye of the storm; ahead of the blinding pains and hospital food, and behind the turbulent fallout with Tim.

The day began with a rare burst of sunlight through the papery curtains in her hospital room. She woke up achy, but tentatively elated at the prospect of waking up in her own bed in 24 hours.

The nurse came in with a little smile on her face, like she was excited on Brianna’s behalf. She’d been Brianna’s nurse for almost every morning shift -- Brianna wishes desperately that she could remember her name, and she feels bad that she doesn’t, but the cocktail of painkillers she was on rendered her memory murky and unreliable. She remembers the nurse’s kind words, the way she handed Brianna a glass of water and a clipboard with her discharge papers.

Walking was a slow and cautious affair, with Brianna clinging to an IV pole and inching her way towards the door. The nurse stood behind her with her arms gently outstretched in case Brianna were to lose her balance. If she weren’t so determined to never lay in a hospital bed ever again, she may have -- but as soon as she rounded the edge of the door frame and saw Melina and Johanna waiting, bouncing on the balls of their feet, she half-sprinted unceremoniously towards them.

“Miss May,” the nurse behind her protested. “Slowly. Go slowly, you can’t stretch your grafts.”

Brianna threw herself into her friends’ arms with nearly as much force as they flung themselves into hers.

“You excited to come home?” Johanna whispered into her ear softly. “We have your room all fixed up nice for you.”

“We gave Romeo a bath, he misses your cuddles,” Melina said.

It was warm outside for late fall, and the walk from the hospital discharge doors to Melina’s car was quicker and more comfortable than the lonely jaunts around her hospital room. Brianna walked between Johanna and Melina, their arms around her, heads on her shoulders softly. The air smelled crisp and dew-sodden like after a storm, and the sky was all baby blues and greys.

Instead of going straight back to the flat, they got breakfast -- cheap but generous plates from a greasy diner, with mugs of grainy coffee on the side. Brianna looked ungraceful as ever in a grey pullover and matching sweatpants, her hair thinned and matted together like an algae formation on the top of her head. And though she’d had only passing glances of herself in mirrors over the past two weeks, she could assume that the bags under her eyes were near record-breaking. Melina and Johanna didn’t seem to mind. In fact, neither of them could keep the smiles off their faces when they looked at her.

“I bet I look proper hilarious, don’t I?” Brianna muttered after a sip of coffee.

“No, we just missed having you ‘round. We could barely sleep last night, we were so excited,” Johanna says. “And come off it, you always look lovely.”

Brianna grinned at her and felt her dry lips crack a little. _Has it been that long since I’ve smiled? Am I that dehydrated?_ She thought. She frowned. Melina, ever watchful, handed her a tube of chapstick.

That breakfast in the diner is one of Brianna’s fondest memories. The pale cream tone of the sunlight coasting over their fingers and hands on the tabletop, fiddling with pink sugar packets and ashtrays while they waited for their food. The clouds of creamer billowing up their dark cups of coffee. The little rips in the tablecloth. Even the sticky red vinyl of the booth seats. Most of all, the way she could slip back into life with Melina and Johanna like nothing had ever interrupted their stride -- no Tim, no fire.

Melina was right -- Romeo was delighted to see Brianna again. He mewled loudly when she came in the door of the flat, and padded over to her with his eyes wide and alight.

“Hello, you,” Brianna said with a little smile. Then she looked at Melina. “Mel, I can’t quite bend down yet, would you pick him up for me?”

Melina scooped the cat with a small coo and slipped him into Brianna’s arms.

“Hello baby boy, I missed you,” Brianna giggled. Romeo poked her nose with his paw.

The three girls and the cat spent the day on the couch having tea and taking short cozy naps, all cuddled up next to each other like spoons in a drawer.

 -

Her first bandage re-dressing was five days later. Tim half-heatedly agreed to go with Brianna to the hospital.  

“No, fuck him. Mel and I will take you,” Johanna protested the morning of the appointment. “It’s five days you’ve been back home and he’s come to see you _once_. Barely. He’s made it clear where he stands.”

“How do you mean?” Brianna sighed, clutching her tea across the kitchen counter. Johanna huffed and scrubbed at a tough bit on a pot in the sink.

“I _mean_ , he’s shown his true colors, hasn’t he? He’s scummy and he doesn’t have your back even when you need it most,” she said. Then she added quietly, “Not to mention he-”

“He didn’t mean to.”

“Yes, well, I’m not so convinced.”

Brianna stared at her. “Do you think I’m thick?”

Johanna stared back and paused in her scrubbing. “Thick? No. Gullible?” She raised her eyebrows and shrugged.

Brianna’s face went hot and her vision narrowed. “You think I’m stupid for being with him, don’t you?”

“I know you’re not stupid, that’s why I can’t figure out why in a million years you’d lower your standards so far.”

Brianna felt something soft brush her ankle. She looked down to see Romeo blinking up at her. She tried to smile at him.

“Real nice of you, Johanna,” Brianna said absently while brushing her fingers along the top of Romeo’s head.

“Please just let me and Mel take you to get your bandages changed. Please.” Johanna turned off the sink.

“Tim’s looking forward to it.” Brianna cleared her throat and looked inquisitively into her cup of tea.

“That’s a bare-faced lie and you know it,” Johanna spat. “I heard you on the phone when you rang him last night. Practically _begged_ him, you did. It was sad, Brianna. _He doesn’t want to go._ Christ, does he even care about you?”

“He was just m-miffed he’d have to get someone to cover his shift,” Brianna said. “The shop’s been busier than usual, ‘s not his fault.”

“That crummy little ice cream shop’s been busy in November, has it?”

Brianna started feeling the air leave her lungs much easier than it came in, like it was being sucked out of her breath by breath. “Just stop it, Jo. He’ll be here to take me any minute.”

“Not if I don’t let him in.”

Brianna groaned loudly. “What __is__ it you have against him, Jo? You’ve had it out for him since I met him and it’s getting old, hearing you whinge and whine about how much you despise him. Just shut up, will you?” She pushed her empty mug of tea across the counter, and it made a scraping noise against the tile.

“You don’t see what I see. You’re fucking _infatuated_ with the bastard,” Johanna raised her voice slightly. Romeo, who’d been sitting placidly by Brianna’s feet, skittered away. “It doesn’t bother you? The way he grabs you by the arm like you’re on a leash when there’s other blokes around? That doesn’t seem even a _wee_ bit strange to you?”

“He’s protective,” Brianna raised her voice in equal measure, staring her sharpest daggers back at Johanna’s.

“What about the times he showed up here, at the flat, in the middle of the night, just to make sure you weren’t gone shagging someone else? Wasn’t that a bit off? Hmm?” Johanna shook her head and crossed her arms.

Brianna didn’t say anything. She stared back with bright eyes and a tired face.

“Or how about,” Johanna said, her voice softer. “How about the time he nearly killed you because he thought you were cracking on with his mates?”

Brianna’s eyes stung and she looked down at the counter’s cream-colored tile, resting her forehead on her propped arm. She tried to take a deep breath but instead, it was very audibly a weak sob. “God, you can never just leave things alone, Johanna,” Brianna said lowly.

Johanna didn’t reply at first. “Why are you crying?” She asked then, her voice high and flat like she was lost for any words of substance.

“These stupid grafts hurt like hell,” Brianna lied and stood up as quickly and gracefully as she could without stretching or twisting the grafts. “I’ll go wait for Tim out front.”

 -

“You look well,” Tim said when Brianna cautiously situated herself into the passenger’s seat of his car.

“Think so?” Brianna smiled at him with the usual impish lure she knew he liked. But she had a feeling she hadn’t pulled it off this time. Tim responded with a blank stare, then a half-smile.

“I miss being with you every day,” Brianna said as they started off in the direction of the hospital. “I can’t get around as easily for now, but once I’m all healed, I’ll be able to, uh, come over to yours more.”

Tim didn’t look at her but made a nearly-imperceptible noise of acknowledgement, his lips pulled tight in a cordial, stiff smile. “Does it hurt?” He asked flatly as they roll to a stoplight.

“The grafts?”

“Yeah.”

“Not exactly. I’m taking lots of pills for the pain. It’s more just uncomfortable, and that’s mostly the bandages anyway,” she nodded over at Tim, trying to catch his eyes. He was fixated on the stoplight like he was trying to will it back to green with his mind.

“How long’s the recovery time for this thing?” He said then.

She’d told him three times already but decided not to make note of this. “Uh, I can’t take a proper shower for another two weeks probably…it’ll be another three before I can significantly move or stretch it…so, no strenuous activities.” She glanced down at her hands and cleared her throat.

“Hm,” Tim made a half-scoff half-hummed sound and said nothing else about it.

“So you said things are really busy at the shop?” Brianna said.

Tim sighed. “They’re short staffed at the moment,” he said tersely.

Brianna nodded. Tim was gripping the steering wheel with one hand, the other draped across his lap lamely. Brianna stared at it. Three weeks ago, had they been driving together, his hand would’ve been on her knee, or on her inner thigh, or drawing lazy circles on her palm. But he seemed to shrink away from her now like her very presence was painful and loud.

“You’re awfully quiet,” she said, laughing shortly.

“Sorry if I’m not in a particularly cheery mood on this occasion,” he snapped quietly as they pulled into the hospital car park. She frowned at him.

“What’s wrong? Spit it out,” she felt Johanna’s words slipping and sliding back into her mind, as uncontrollable as flies with razor-sharp wings, buzzing louder and louder. Her chest was tightening. _You’re fucking infatuated with the bastard. He doesn’t have your back when you need it most. He doesn’t want to go. Does he even care about you?_

Brianna swallowed hard.

_Does he even care about me?_

“It’s just a lot to process, alright, don’t rip my head off,” Tim pulled the keys out of the ignition and leaned back in his seat with a heavy sigh.

“It’s a lot for you to process?” Brianna squinted at him. “All this is difficult for you, Tim?”

“Well, yeah,” his voice was tight. He finally looked at her and his eyes were reddish and glazed. “I’m fucking stressed out all the time and…and…”

Brianna softened. “I’m going to be fine, Tim. I’m fine. I’m going to make a full recovery, you don’t need to stress about me.”

“Yeah, I know you are.”

“What’s stressing you, then?”

“Same stuff as always. Work. My mates. Parents.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and squinted out at the bleak morning light. “Just have a lot of steam I need to blow off. I’m all tense.”

Brianna felt weak, swaying in her seat as she understood what he must mean. “You can wait three more weeks, can’t you?” She said in a small voice.

“You’re going to be late for the appointment, let’s go,” Tim said.

“Don’t move,” Brianna reached towards him and gripped his arm. He stared at her. “Is that why you’re all bent out of shape? Is that why you haven’t been by to see me? It’s because you can’t fuck me?”

“”S not my fault I have _needs _.__  It’s not just that. It’s like I can’t even talk to you or nothing, not like we used to. You’re not… _you_.” He pulled his arm out of Brianna’s grasp. “And I’ve been by a few times. That Deacon girl’s getting in your head.”

Brianna nearly short-circuited with anger. _That Deacon girl?_  “Needs?” Brianna repeated, her voice shrill.

“Yeah, needs. Tim glared at her. “An’ I’m not saying you need to do anything about it, neither. I’m just being honest.” He sniffed and crossed his arms. “You’re not the same.”

__“_ Not the same? _It’s barely been three _bloody_ weeks! So I’m just…I’m just supposed to put up with your shitty attitude ‘till you can use me to _blow off steam_ again, yeah? Talk over me and do whatever you like me when I’m back to my good old self?” Brianna shrieked at him.

“Don’t lose your head, blimey. You’re twisting my words. Let’s go to this fucking appointment, alright?”

“N-”

“We’re not talking about it anymore.” He pulled on the handle of the driver’s side door.

“Tim!”

“Brianna,” he raised his voice to a near-shout. “It’s not up for discussion. Fucking drop it, yeah?”

 

The walk to the check-in desk felt like an execution via public humiliation. Tim had gone to stone beside her, walking with his hands in his pockets and his eyes flat, while she sniffled and and wiped her tears before they could fall. The doctors avoided eye contact when they passed, but the nurses looked unbearably sympathetic, their eyes cast to the floor. It was as if they all knew they were looking at a couple on the verge of completely disintegrating into rubble and ash, and they didn’t know what to do except pretend they weren’t there.

In the consulting room of the dermatology ward, the middle-aged but kind-faced doctor removed the bandages carefully with Brianna laying on her uninjured side, facing the wall. Tim stood next to her, but at an uncomfortable distance.

“Let me know if there’s any stinging or pain,” the doctor said.

Brianna nodded silently and winced at the feeling of the doctor’s gloved fingers pressing around the edges of her wound dressing.

“Can I look at it?” She asked quickly. “Once the bandages are off?”

The doctor was silent for a minute, then sighed. “I don’t want to give you a shock,” he said. “Chances are it still looks quite gruesome. Not quite so gruesome as the last time you were here, of course. But it’s not a pleasant sight just yet.”

“I want to see how it’s coming along.”

“Of course,” he said. He began lifting the edges of the medical tape along Brianna’s lower belly by her hip bones, edging the bandages upward and off towards her back, then across the side of her breast and back across her torso and stomach. “It’s shaped quite like a continent, isn’t it? A bit like an upside down Africa?” The doctor noted with a short chuckle. Brianna said nothing. “My apologies, darling. Best to try to find humor in these things, I find. Tell me to shut up, by all means.”

Then Brianna felt a strange uneven coldness all over her now-exposed side. She heard a sharp intake of breath from Tim.

“Let me see it,” Brianna said.

Begrudgingly, the doctor brought her a plastic hand mirror and held it up for her, angling it just enough for her to see the wound. She felt like she was going to faint for what must have been the third time that morning.

Her first thought was like a large, ugly wine stain. It was reds and purples and deep crimsons. Some parts were scabbing over, and some parts still looked fresh, bloody, and meaty like they hadn’t healed at all. It was the most unsightly in the middle of the side of her torso, under her breast and above her hip where the dying flames had been the hottest and most constant. The graft here was ‘taking well’, according to the doctor, but was leaking and discoloring in the process. This portion of the wound was the furthest from her normal skin, so it would take the longest to heal -- _“like how it takes the longest for the middle bit of the food to heat up in a toaster oven,”_ Johanna said when Brianna conveyed the takeaway to her later.

“You look like you’re going to tip over. Sit down, lad,” Brianna heard the doctor say, and she knew he was talking to Tim.

“You alright, Tim?” Brianna said quietly but bitterly before she could think better of it.

The re-dressing required some ointment application on the wound, which was the most painful part. Then new bandages and cotton sheets were laid and taped down. The doctor handed Brianna a bottle of the ointment before they left.

“Grafts don’t have their own oil glands so as it heals you’ll need to make sure you moisturize it and put this on it, just as I did. You’ll need to keep the thing covered and out of the sun for a good few months but you can take off the bulky dressings…I’d say in a week, perhaps? After that you can cover it with plain gauze and put on the ointment with some lotion every day before bed.” He said it all while scribbling some care notes onto a slip of paper, which he tore and placed in her hand. “Your next check-up with us should be in another seven or eight days. Schedule it with the front desk, alright?”

 -

She was too tired to fight with Tim, but too angry to talk to him. He dropped her off silently at home, his mouth half-open like he was grasping for something to say. But he didn’t say anything. He sped off into the quickly-darkening late morning as a storm rolled in. Brianna watched his car till it turned at the end of the street and disappeared.

“How was it?” Melina was pouring a tablespoon of coffee into a filter when Brianna opened the front door. Her face immediately fell when she looked at Brianna. “What is it, darling?”

Johanna and Melina were, as always, gentle and understanding. When Brianna started to cry, Johanna lead her by the arm to her bed to lay her down, and Brianna could barely look at her out of embarrassment. _She was right, like always, wasn’t she? ‘That Deacon girl’,_ Brianna thought as she settled onto the duvet.

Melina came in carrying Romeo in one arm and holding a mug of coffee with the other. With a sympathetic depth in her brown eyes, she laid the mug on the side table and then sat next to Brianna.

“Brought the boy,” Melina said softly, petting Romeo between the ears. Brianna rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm and sniffed. She patted the spot on the bed next to her. Melina placed Romeo there, and he kneaded his paws into the duvet a few times. Then he slumped against Brianna’s uninjured side, purring and humming. Brianna leaned down to give him a kiss on the top of his head. The rain outside started to fall just as Brianna was drifting off.

 -

They walk into Harpole Exchange with a small mass of objects they decide they can part with. The place smells like cigar smoke and dust. Brianna wrinkles her nose at a sleek floor-length fur coat draped on a stained dress form by the door.

Regina stomps up to the man sitting behind a glass jewelry case. Brianna follows slowly, taking in the goods of the shop, picturing her and Regina’s things shoved pointlessly between them like bricks in a chipping wall.

“This one’s real gold. So’s this one.” Regina’s leaning on the counter with one hand in her hair and the other picking rings up out of a pile, showing them to the pawnbroker. “One or two might be platinum. That’s real turquoise.”

He mutters something and bends down, places a small toolkit on the glass countertop. He takes out a small magnifying glass the size of his thumb and lifts it to his eye, holding one of Regina’s gold rings in his other hand.

He examines each one closely, making notes on a slip of receipt paper. Regina has her carpet bag open on the counter and she rummages through it with her back to Brianna.

“You’re not gonna try to sell me that piece of rubbish, are you?” the man grumbles in between his examinations, jabbing a finger at the carpet bag.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Regina snarks. She tosses a few more rings into the pile, and a necklace.

Brianna comes up behind her, and with a heavy sigh, heaves her guitar case up onto the glass counter. The man stares at her.

“This as well,” Brianna mutters. She feels Regina look at her, but avoids her eyes. “It’s a 1920’s Vettel. Acoustic.”

“Hmm,” the pawnbroker eyes the case, and then looks back at Brianna. “I’ll give in the look-over when I’m finished with these here.” He nods down at the rings.

Brianna can feel her eyes stinging as she looks at her guitar case on the glass countertop, so she walks away quickly, immersing herself in the trinkets and antiques of the pawnshop. There’s a painting on the opposite wall, a floor-length portrait of a regal-looking woman in a blue gown. Her face is stern and cold, and Brianna wishes she could be as flat and unfeeling. Beside the painting is a floor lamp, its golden rod tarnished charmingly, with a cloudy glass lampshade atop it like a wobbly crown. _If only I could dissolve into an object and never have to feel anything ever again,_ she thinks bitterly.

She hears footsteps on the creaky floor behind her.

“He’s looking at the guitar now, if you…want to go over there,” Regina says in a small voice. She stands next to Brianna.

“I will in a minute.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“How being an antique gathering dust is preferable to being a human sometimes.”

Regina chuckles wryly. “If you were something in here, what would you be?”

Brianna looks at her. There’s a softness in her eyes that hadn’t been there all day.

“Good question,” Brianna says, casting a lengthy gaze around the pawn shop’s interior. On the wall nearest the door there’s an intricately-carved hutch laden with mantelpiece antiques and statues. Brianna walks over to it. “This little bloke, I think.” She picks up a porcelain statue just a few inches tall, of a child holding a calico kitten in its arms.

“I didn’t know you liked cats so much,” Regina says.

“When I lived with Mel and Jo I was particularly fond of one of theirs. It’s just…been on my mind today,” she says.

“That’s sweet,” Regina says softly. “Do they still have him?”

“No, he died a few months ago. They have three others now, though. But he was sort of like _my_ cat, you know? Not really, but…” she looks at the statue. “he was like a little friend.”

Regina doesn’t say anything but lays her head on Brianna’s arm.

“Sorry for yelling earlier,” she mumbles, pressing her face against the sleeve of Brianna’s jacket. “For saying you’re-”

“Mental?” Brianna breathes out.

Regina stiffens against her and wraps her arm around Brianna’s. “Yeah.”

Brianna shifts uncomfortably on her feet as Regina clings to her jacket sleeve like a shy child.

“You’re not,” Regina whispers. “You’re not mental.”

“Why’d you say it, then?” Brianna grumbles, standing as still as the porcelain child staring at her.

Regina clings tighter. “I don’t know, I’m sorry,” her voice cracks like old floorboards. “I was just being angry and stupid. So I said what I thought would hurt.”

“It did.”

“I know, it was an awful thing to say.”

“Is that what you think?” Brianna asks softly, more curious than accusatory. She looks down at Regina. “Does it really bother you that I’m…” she swallows. “the way that I am?”

Regina goes pale. “No, of course it doesn’t,” she says.

They stare at each other for an elongated, sore moment. Then, from the jeweller’s case, the man calls: “Alright, I’ve got a quote for you girls.”

 

They leave the pawn shop with Regina’s cash envelope stuffed. Brianna feels too drained to talk, although she can’t pinpoint exactly what’s taken it out of her today -- they’d done nothing but drive, yet she feels as if she’s recovering from a month-long illness, or a particularly arduous hike. Though the silence in the van as they drive away is suffocating, there isn’t anything Brianna can think to say, so she lets it sit and grow still and cold like old bathwater.


End file.
